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dao-

"What This Here Compound Needs Is..."

I'm having a hard time reading this. Is this proper English? Serious question from a non-native speaker.

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>Is this proper English?

No, but his slang is deliberate wordplay.

Take note of the author's page: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/about-derek-lowe

The author is from Arkansas (the South). Even though he has an advanced degree from a prestigious university and knows what "proper English" is, it seems he likes to play with Southern dialect.

The journal he's writing for ('A'AAS) is 'A'merican so native readers (even those outside of the South) will understand the slang.

It looks like 99% of his hundreds of blog articles have straightforward serious titles but a few have cutesy irreverent ones. A few more examples of Southern colloquialisms such as "gosh", "darn", and "dang":

>Gosh, Fellows, There’s a Better Way http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/08/26/gos...

>The Papers In This Journal Are Just So Darn Relevant http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2012/07/03/the...

>Biosimilars: Not So Dang Easy http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/05/18/bio...

The slang is also a flag for sarcasm/joking in this context (and many others). It's actually meant to come across as a bad idea stated by someone of questionable intelligence or at least wisdom.

This here is a southern dialect in the US of A, partner!

Try some appalachian dialects, ow lawd 'av mercy.

Ain't nobody gon' understand them folk but the devil trees they live under.

spits into a bucket and continues carving a squirrel mantlepiece

Y'all crazier than a rabid squirrel!

To answer the original question: the article is explicitly humorous whike also using the correct language for the topic. It's meant to be "harder to read" as a way to add a layer of wordplay.

It also, for those familiar with the semiotics of American English dialects, subtly invokes the "Hold my beer - hey, y'all, watch this!" stereotype of rednecks.

It's what makes Huntsville Alabama so entertaining. Equal parts rocket scientists and rednecks.

"I wonder what would happen if I ran my small-block Chevy on some hydrazine? Because Nitrous injection is for wimps."

(Hydrazine is highly toxic and dangerously unstable unless handled in solution.)

Precisely - I took it as a joking accusation that he considers this sort of thing reckless, cowboy chemistry.

TIL "semiotics"

Nice.

It means "What this compound needs is..."

"this here" is a colloquialism in some places in (I think) the US.

Best i can tell it shows up most often in westerns, or when a character is supposed to be from a remote rural area.

Sounds like the result of a "too-direct" translation from Danish (maybe German too?). "Hvad dette her stof behøver er noget hydrogenperoxid"

There's a bit of German influence on American English, that's true, like 'how goes?'. Also Dutch, as in 'How come?'

It's from Southern American English.

It's really part of a sort of a generalized redneck/rural argot, at this point. I'm from the farthest northern stretch of the Appalachians, a stone's throw from Canada, and quite often flummox people when I tell them I'm not from West Virginia or Kentucky.

That's because it didn't originate on this side of the pond. You can also find it in the West Country dialect(s); think Hagrid, Samwise Gamgee or Robert Newton's prototypical movie pirate captains (Long John Silver and Blackbeard). Poke around England a little more, and you'll probably find it elsewhere as well. Standard English really is a much smaller and lesser-used dialect than most literate people think it is.

Strictly Sam wise should probably have used black country dialect given where JRRT grew up - its the Rural version of a Birmingham (UK) accent.

But I suspect they would have had to subtitled it :-)

As a non-native speaker, that raises my eyebrows as in "What? From Guyana?"

Though it is right of course, i.e. Southern American is different from South American.

"This here" is a drop-in replacement for "this", and is mainly used as an emphasis marker in the South and West. Adding more words that do not add to the meaning of the sentence makes it the same idea, but more of it.

Compare:

  We have a communication failure.
  What we've got here, is failure to c'mmunicate.

"Have" is the base word. "Have got" is the same as "have", but with more "havingness" somehow. "Have got here" is also "have", but with so much "havingness" that you might find yourself unable to get rid of whatever it is without a severe beating. And with "what <subj> have got here is", well, you're just going to get shot.

"this here" is a US colloquialism which is being used as a character joke. Imagine a cowboy voice while reading it.

You can ignore the "here".

I don't think it's technically proper English. It's just a way that some people in some parts of the US sometimes speak. At least, that's what I, as a Canadian, have noticed during a lifetime of watching US TV shows. Now that I think about it, maybe it's a TV-only thing? I can't say I've ever observed a real live American say it.

To read it more easily, try removing the word 'here'.

> I don't think it's technically proper English

We've got ourselves a linguistic prescriptivist here, folks... String him up. ;-)

From my own native dialect of English you could simply tell him to "haud yer wheesht".

It's the proper thing to do for one with an "arsoot th'windeh"?

It's a feature of the Southern and Texan dialects, and appears occasionally in AAVE, mostly among older speakers. As a Southron, it's fairly natural for me to say it, but since that dialect marks low status most places outside its home region, I generally code-switch into acrolect, so you wouldn't hear me say it. The same is true for most other Southrons I've known outside the South - especially those of us who can't or won't shake the accent, and have social or professional reason to avoid being perceived as a dumb redneck. (Sometimes that happens anyway, but one doesn't help oneself by making it more likely.)

> Southron

> acrolect

I just learned two new words, and I like words. Thanks!

You are most welcome!

I think you can make it into an oddly useful personality trait, where you can say things that get remembered. Instead of "If we can't get this software to handle the load we'll have to rewrite it," you get to say, "Wall, shucks, if we can't git this mule to cross the river, we gon' have to find us another mule."

Not really. Sounding like a redneck is good for a laugh, but otherwise generally counterproductive in professional settings outside the South.

"this here" is redundant; "This" being something near the speaker, "here" being near the speaker. This type of redundancy is often found in rural and vernacular speech in the US. A similar redundant construct is "I don't got no..." meaning "I do not have any...", but one that is entirely more grotesque to my ear.

It could be worse. Could be: "Ain't got no..."

I actually typed that at first, but then I didn't want to explain Yet Another Dialectism to a non-native speaker. :P

The repetition isn't redundant. It's for emphasis. "I don't got no..." is much stronger than "I don't have any...".

Not so much for emphasis as because of different rules for spatial deixis. Even Standard English used to have more than just this and that; we also had yon to indicate things that were farther away than that, and there are finer distinctions in several dialects of English (and in many languages other than English).

what some are passing over is, while its a form of speech in parts of America, it along with the general tone of his article, are all parts of the humor wrapped around a very serious subject.

I take it as redneck humor, as in famous last words of "Hey ya'll, watch this"

It's dialect, but native speakers would generally understand it.

If you imagine a grizzled Texan spitting into the dirt and saying it just after the words "Dangit Clancy..."

... it makes a lot more sense.

Or Bobby from Supernatural

Dang eejits.

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