"Look, the bill needs fixed"

Ohio Gov. John Kasich grew up in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, just down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh, and has retained many dialect features from the Pittsburgh region. Notably, Kasich, like others from the area, would say "The car needs washed" rather than "The car needs to be washed" or "The car needs washing." (The Yale Grammatical Diversity Project calls this the "needs washed" construction; it's also been called the "need + V-en" construction.) Last year, Kasich demonstrated this feature in a Republican presidential debate, when he said "The country needs healed." On Sunday, Kasich gave us another example of the construction on NBC's "Meet the Press." Discussing the healthcare legislation proposed by congressional Republicans, Kasich told Chuck Todd, "Look, the bill needs fixed" (at 1:35 in the video).

Interestingly, Kasich is not consistent in his usage. Just 30 seconds later, he says, "But what I would tell you is the exchange needs to be fixed." Perhaps he caught himself saying "needs fixed" and then went with the more standard version the second time around. It's a dialect feature that he may be self-conscious about using when addressing a national audience, especially after the fuss made over "The country needs healed" last year.

It's clear, though, that the construction continues to puzzle those from outside of the Pittsburgh dialect region (or elsewhere it might be used, such as among Scottish speakers). NBC's official transcript of the Kasich interview gets it wrong, rendering "The bill needs fixed" as "The bill needs fix." Perhaps the transcriber thought that Kasich meant to say "The bill needs a fix" but left out the "a" — akin to Neil Armstrong saying "That's one small step for man" instead of "…a man." But this is just a regionalism that doesn't need fixed. (For more, see "Annals of 'needs washed'," Sept. 9, 2011.)