I’ll preface this by saying that English is not my mother language and I’m sorry if this isn’t the right community, but I didn’t find a more appropriate one.

Last year I started to notice more and more people on YouTube for example using the verb “to put” without a preposition – like “Now I put the cheese” – which sounds very weird and kind of feels wrong to me. Is this really used in spoken English and is it grammatically correct?

  • grabyourmotherskeys@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    I have worked in a lot of kitchens where English was the standard language but different groups spoke Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Swiss German, French, Arabic, Croatian, Tamil, etc. (not always the same time) and we just needed to work so the language was rudimentary and often literal translations.

    “Put me three eggs” meaning “get me three eggs”.

    “I make it” meaning “I’ll do it”.

    And so on.

    “Close the fire” would be “turn off the burner”.

    I figured out at some point that “close” was like closing a switch. And that things like me, my, mine were not always easy for people. You’d hear “put me lettuce in fridge”.

    I want to be very clear I am not making fun of anyone. I sounded exactly the same when I was saying stuff in non-English (e.g. the garde manger were all Spanish at one place so they used it and when I worked their section I’d try to use it).

    Edit - we talked like this outside of work too when having a beer “baby 3 now, get cake in morning, grows fast!”. Good friends learn each others languages better but its mostly vocabulary and not grammar.