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Comment by 123sereusername | Hacker News Reader

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I'm a native English speaker from the US, and a pedant who hates "ask" as a noun, "workshop" as a verb, and "performant" as a word. But I don't get the hate for "learnings" here. What's wrong with it? "Lessons" connotes negativity, "stuff I learned" doesn't naturally fit into many sentences, and "useful information gleaned" can be shoved right back up the tightly puckered ass it came out of.

What's the problem? That title is exactly the way I would have written it.

Out of curiosity, what's your take on how to write "this item requires repair"?

"It needs repaired" is something I've seen, which to me is confusing, because it seems like "to be" is missing. When did "needs" run away from the words it's been associated with before?

They wrote this for you, I think:

https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/needs-washed

Oh wow, reading this makes me deeply uncomfortable in an odd way. Like it could pollute my brain and somehow it would become normal to say things like that. I didn't dare read it all.

This is a regionalism in parts of the US, which I’ve seen described as Pittsburgh and its surroundings.

I come across it often and struggle with cognitive dissonance every time - I know of the regionalism but it feels so strongly like a glaring grammatical error.

I see/hear the specific phrase “needs fixed” most often.

"This shit's broke."

Seriously, though, I'm with you on "It needs to be repaired."

Then again, I went to school in the land of the yinzers, so "it needs repaired" doesn't even sound all that off to me anymore even though I'd never use it myself. (I kind of mentally map it to "it needs repairing".) But I think of that as a dialect of English, with no bearing on "standard" English.

For standard English, it has to be "it needs to be repaired", "it requires repair", "it needs repairing", or "excuse me, my good sir, but I do believe that this shit here is most definitely in need of repair".

So you're saying "needs" is not doing the needful.

I always thought of "learning" as an uncountable noun.

This is a ridiculous, arbitrary judgment that has nothing to do with anything even remotely related to this post. This type of pedantry is low-brow and annoying.

The fact that it is tangentially related to the post doesn't make it any less valuable.

As a non-native speaker I find this discussion as interesting as the original post. I like to hear native speakers give their "opinions" on all matters language as it lightens some dark alleys of the language that are otherwise inaccessible.

Today's lesson: "it needs repaired" is equally puzzling for some native speakers as it seems to be a regional thing :)

Also: yinzers.

It's an incorrect judgement that's entirely ignorant of the entire field of linguistics. People should have fewer opinions of this type as they are founded on very wrong ideas of how language works. In short, it is not valuable at all in any context.

It's also plainly wrong, because "learnings" is perfectly commonplace.

Take it up with Shakespeare?

https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/play_view....

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