Having read Happy Like Murderers, 'that wants to be fixed' makes me think of Fred West. It was like, his catchphrase or something.

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Happy Like Murderers

Don't take this the wrong way, but I've always wondered who actually reads books like this ... and, more to the point, why.

So -- what made you want to read it? Did you find it interesting/enjoyable?

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It's an excellent book. I find serial killers interesting, especially the really pervy ones like Fred & Rose West. It's amazing just how pervy they were; moreso than the papers ever printed at the time. Fascinating stuff.

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Um. Okay. Your Kink Is Not My Kink. But thanks for answering.

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I use "that needs fixing", "that needs to be fixed" and "that needs fixed" more or less interchangeably; that is, they all feel right to me. OTOH I'm aware that "that needs fixed" is probably the most colloquial/idiomatic (or likely to be regarded as such by the people I'm likely to talk to, moo moo disclaimer quack quack quack) so if I'm talking in a formal context I'll probably use one of the others.

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but "fixed" isn't an infinitive, and "that needs" demands an infinitive, so "that needs fixed" JUST ISN'T ENGLISH.
I dunno, youth of today, when I were a lad (ambles off, grumbling)

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Hold on a moment, what about "that needs fixing" or, indeed, "that needs an infinitive"?

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Ok, as an object for the verb you can have an infinitive, a noun, or whatever-part-of-speech "-ing" is coz it acts as a noun.
participle?
Where's Linz when I need her?

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-ing is a gerund (when it's used as a noun). An infinitive isn't acting as a noun, though - that's a separate use.

The thing is with "that needs fixed", is there's an implicit elipsis - "that needs [to be] fixed". I think the language can cope with this elipsis within idioms.

e.g. verbs are normally qualified with adverbs not adjectives, but "I feel happy" (as opposed to happily), because the use of an adjective with feel, seem, look, &c. is taken to imply a relative clause "I feel [that I am] happy"

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I disagree: "needs" can be the third person singular of the verb "need", as well as the plural of the noun.

Thus "this is the cupboard that needs fixed" actually means "more than one need fixed this cupboard". It doesn't make much sense, but it does make enough that "to be" shouldn't have been removed.

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Never said it was English. But nor are half the words I use on a day-to-day basis! And English itself is a bastard mongrel language anyway, and blah blah quack quack moo.

(And it doesn't demand an infinitive, or are you saying that it's incorrect for it to take a present participle as well?)

Anyway, "X needs/wants done" is fairly common usage in Norn Iron, & I think also in Scotland. I think I picked it up from hanging around lots of Norn Irish folks at university (when I wasn't busy making them say "power shower" for my own amusement). My brain is a veritable piece of flypaper when it comes to linguistic quirks.

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(when I wasn't busy making them say "power shower" for my own amusement).

We obviously have the same sense of humour... my Norn Iron DH gets very fed up with me asking him if he enjoyed his "sharrr", or asking him what he looks in to shave (a "murrrr", apparently) or what he sees at the cinema (a "fillum").

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The "to be" is implicit, much like the spaces in "isn't" and "dunno".

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"that needs fixed" is apparently common-to-standard in Scots. (Now accepted by the EU as a regional language!) I was completely unaware of it until a Scottish poster on alt.gothic talked about it at length. Then I noticed other people using it when I moved here.

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I use "that needs whatever" more often than "that wants whatever" ... and I use "to be fixed" more often than "fixing".

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What about "That should be fixed", or my personal favourite "someone should fix that."

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Information wants to be fixed!

What you need, for these two-parter polls, is an LJ display mode that automatically plots the two answers against one another in some way, so that you can see at a glance if there's an obvious correlation.

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Glad I read this comment before posting the same thing.
Let's call it cross tabulation, though, and NOT a "pivot table".

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We could retrofit it: write a CGI that looks at its referrer (which must match a chosen pattern), picks apart the poll answers found there, and outputs an image containing the results of whatever extra analysis you wanted.

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Must talk to you offline about CGI scripts doing stuff - got an application I don't *quite* know how to write but I know what it wants to do...

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I was born and raised in Germany, my dad is English, and the school I went to was attended predominantly by speakers of American. So my vocabulary is a bit of a mix.

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