the bed
Kate often makes fun of my phraseology when I refer to my bed. I say things like "I hear the bed calling my name" or "It's time to go get in the bed." Apparently adding the definite article before "bed" is strange. I'd really never thought about this until the last 6 months or so.Reading Bill Bryson's The Mother Tongue, I've come across a couple references and explanations of this idiosyncracy in my idiolect:
From a section on gender: "Not only have we discarded problems of gender with definite and indefinite articles, we have often discarded the articles themselves. We say in English, 'It's time to go to bed,' where in most other European languages they must say, 'It's the time to go to the bed.'"
And later from a chapter on dialect, "North Carolinians also give themselves away when they say, 'She's still in the bed.'"
posted by CP @ 9:20 AM
1 thoughts
1 Comments:
Oh Courtney... I say "the bed" too! I didn't realize that it was a NC thing. I used to work for a lady who always complained that our part-time college student always looked (and evidently smelled) like he didn't put a lot of effort into getting ready in the morning. He "smelled like the bed." Weird, right? But she's totally Gadsden County, not North Carolina.
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