Dear Mr. J:
You wrote:
I keep seeing “Need Gone” on Facebook and other selling pages. When did this horrid expression become so popular? I am not that smart can you tell me why need gone is bad?
I need gone
We Need Gone
Furniture Need gone
Dog Gone, all above are very poor English. The furniture is sold (not gone). How about I would like to sell quickly?
I guess I do not use Facebook enough to see that expression. I think the problem is that it is ambiguous even when grammatically OK. For example, does “We need gone furniture” mean “We need furniture that is gone” or “We need our furniture to be gone”?
Your web page says:
Gone or Went?
Gone is the past participle of to go. Used as the verb of a sentence, it must always be preceded by an auxiliary verb such as has, have, had, is, am, are, was, were, be, or one of their contractions. Went is the past tense of to go. It never takes an auxiliary verb.
Incorrect: They gone to the movies. (Gone needs an auxiliary verb.)
Correct: They have gone to the movies.
Correct: They are gone to the movies.
Correct: They went to the movies.
Incorrect: You could have went with them. (Went takes no auxiliary verb.)
Correct: You could have gone with them.
Technically, any past participle can be used as an adjective, but since “go” is always intransitive, the meaning would often be ambiguous in English. We tend to put it in clauses or phrases as I did in the two examples above: “that is gone” (clause) and “to be gone” (phrase). Other languages use participles where English would use a clause or an infinitive phrase.
I would not be surprised to find that “need gone” may sometimes simply be the result of an online “translator” like Babelfish, translating a language with different grammar into English. For example, many Eastern European languages use participles that way, and many Asian languages do not distinguish among parts of speech the same way English does. It might come from something originally written in some such language.
Back in the fifties and early sixties, “gone” was used as a slang adjective to mean “good,” especially among beatniks, e.g. “He was a really gone drummer.” The hippies changed that to “far out” later in the sixties. But that does not appear to be such a throwback in the examples you gave.
Where we are located near New York City, so the common misuse is not with “gone” as much as “went.” In this area you can hear a lot of “have went.”
I agree with Mr. J. It has always puzzled me, especially with the written word, why folks want to shorten their thought. “Need gone” is one of my current pet-peeves. They could say “need to sell” or “need this sold by tomorrow” – what are they doing with all the words they are saving?
As Mr. Hobson said “… you have a marvelous economy with words”
I see it all over on Facebook, in groups for my somewhat rural/suburban county in western Washington, and I’m very sure that the people using it are native speakers of American English, so it’s not a translator blortch. I have also seen it as “needs gone” as if the verb corresponds to the object itself rather than the lister. I have also seen occasionally a similar construction, “needs cleaned” or “wants cleaned” (ascribing desire to an inanimate object) as a statement of condition. I would have used the “needs cleanING” or “needs TO BE cleaned”, but no, they say “needs cleaned.” Is it New Englander brevity that has somehow jumped the breadth of the country?
Dear K McCarty,
Thanks for the note. I would go with the gerund. I confess that I have not heard “needs gone” or anything like it. I am not on Facebook, but if it is a trend, I usually hear it from my students. I have not heard that from any students yet. I have lived most of my life in New England, so I suspect its origin is from another part of the country.
“Needs gone” is still currently doing the rounds here in the UK in local Facebook market pages. I find it at the very least an annoyance, and at it’s fullest a transgression against my language. ARRRGGGHH!
I hate it!
People say these phrases all the time in Pennsylvania—very educated people. I haven’t heard it in my travels until moving here and it drives me nuts. (Needs done, needs cleaned, Needs gone) I am glad to not be the only one that notices this and is disturbed.
I’m in Canada and I see this all of the time on the Buy/Sell Pages on Facebook and in ads that appear on the website Kijiji. Personally, I can’t stand it. Why it is suddenly so difficult to write a complete sentence is beyond me.
Need Gone is totally unnecessary to post in an ad.