This might be completely vague and stupid, but after staying in Manhattan a few times over the last few years, I swear I’ve heard multiple random people say instead of , “You think I should do…?”, or just “So should I do…?”, they say “You want I should…?”.
Example: “You want me to wash the cars tomorrow?”. I heard them say, “You want I should wash the cars tomorrow?”
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What the hell does “You want I should” mean
How often do you hear people say things they didn’t actually say?
I’ve never heard this before in my life.
I’ve literally only heard Dan Akroyd in Blues Brothers use that phrase when he’s pretending to be a gas station employee. I’ve never heard anyone in NYC use it.
That sounds like an old fashioned, possibly Yiddish, word order.
Yiddish
https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/28zar2/what_do_you_want_i_should_do_dialectical/
That’s a Yiddish expression, but an antique one at that. It’s not common anywhere outside of speaking to 80 year old rebbe playing chess in a park somewhere.
Is that even English?
It’s definitely an east coast “thing”. I have heard it before from friends from that area and I think it’s pretty common in certain regions. I live in the PNW and have never heard it used by people from here.
I havent heard that, I also dont think that is something that is said often either. Now, there are people that speak in the same patterns of their first language when translating to English, but even then, thats an odd speech pattern.
I had a stroke reading this
I’ve certainly heard this, even out west. I always assumed it was just an adaptation of the subjunctive from other languages – it would work well if translated literally to French or Italian, for example.
I hear this in NYC tropes. I wanna say Yiddish.
Yeah, it’s called the subjunctive tense which is hardly used in English. I’ve never heard it outside of old Steinbeck novels and was under the impression that it was only used in very rural areas.
Sounds like you accuse stumbled back into the 1930s
Uncle Leo‽
Jew here, I’ve had a few elderly relatives that talk like this, but nobody that’s still around. But that King of the Hill episode when Carl Reiner is dating Hank’s mom will do the trick if you need to hear it.
It’s a grammatical construction from Yiddish. A lot of Ashkenazi Jews settled in NY/NJ/CT/PA/MD and their families spoke Yiddish when they came here. Sadly, events in Europe in the 1930s & 1940s made Jews everywhere afraid to express their culture, so that generation never passed Yiddish down to their children.
Common with older comedians. It’s Yiddish in tense and it’s not the only phrase but a whole way of talking.
Absolutely no one says this who isn’t Jewish, and maybe more NYC/NY/NJ Jewish.
Once in a while I’ll see a foreigner – usually a Brit – writing American dialogue in a story and they will use this grammar. It’s a huge indicator they’re not from the US.
As a New Yorker it sounds natural to me. It isn’t something I hear very often, but it’s out there. I’m pretty sure I’ve even used it at some point. As many have said, it has roots in Yiddish-English.
Never heard of that phrasing here in DC
I grew up on the west coast with East Coaster Yiddish speaking great-grandparents and I’ve actually never heard this before as a regular thing but it seems plausible. In the South, people say “you might could” and “you might should” in place of “maybe you could/should” or the equivalent, and that will never not drive me crazy.
Maybe in the South you would hear “*If* you want I *could* wash your car”
Jew here
It sounds like Yiddish influenced English and/or German influenced English
Sounds like something a mobster in a movie would say.