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Dialect variation. For me, saying “the car needs washed” sounds truly strange but millions and millions of people say it. You’re experiencing similar with this phrase.
I believe you, I had just never heard it was “wrong” and it’s never stood out to me.
Funny enough I learned about it in a linguistics class from a professor out of Michigan. Never heard the concept before and I think a lot of people had their minds blown.
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But that’s just a ‘bone apple tea’ of “chest of drawers”? It’s not a correct term.
(I figured surely there’s an actual word for misheard terms being butchered in writing, but a quick search failed me so I went with the colloquial name.)
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the car needs washed
Is there a name/term for this abomination? I’ve only ever heard one person speak in that form (omitting “to be”), and it has haunted me ever since.
I think you’d call this elision. Assume that the phrase is originally “the car needs to be washed” but you cut out “to be”, making it into a shorter form. It’s pretty common in language to shorten things to make it faster to speak. Think of the endless contractions in English or perhaps leaving part of a sentence completely unspoken because the content is easily assumed by the interlocutors.
Worse, to me, is that there is a perfectly grammatically correct way to be just as brief.
Wrong:
The bed sheets need washed.
Right:
The bed sheets need washing.
And for a linguist the question is really whether there are native speakers who consider it correct. Here there are millions who say yes.
