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Comment by jstanley | Hacker News Reader

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

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

"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.

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.

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