Originally published on Cohost with no title. The title I chose came from a tag that autocompleted when I used the “#english language” tag.
today, when trying to express
i need to use the bathroom
enough brain quirks fired at once to turn it into the monstrosity
i got needing bathroom using
sometimes i astound myself with my own eloquence. in this essay, i will examine the resonable (and unreasonable) transformations you could use to purposefully construct it
oh? you thought this would be a joke? you thought i wouldn’t actually write an essay? this is cohost i can do what i want
(this content was produced in collaboration with an anonymous linguist friend)
1) Nounify the verb
It’s common knowledge that, in English, you can verbify1 most nouns (to varying degrees of success). For some verbs, you can also go backwards, forming a gerund (verb conjugation that acts like a noun). I bring that up to confuse you, as we are not actually forming a gerund yet, just going back to a related noun “need” from the verb “to need”2 Our sentence is now
i have the need to use the bathroom
2) Change the tense of “to use”
For some reason, we can change the infinitive “to use” into a Progressive Infinitive, “to be using”. This makes the sentence more complex, but I think it adds clarity about when the action will happen (in the future).
i have the need to be using the bathroom
3) Make an object gerund
Recall that a gerund is a conjugation of verb that acts like a noun. We have one of these in our sentence: “using”. Because it’s being applied to an object, “bathroom”, it can make a special form of compound noun known3 as an noun-gerund compound, “bathroom using”. This transformation golfs a word and adds a little flair to an otherwise standard phrasing. A hypen may or may not be required, I am choosing not to add one for reasons3
i have the need to be bathroom using
4) Fully gerundify “need”
Earlier, we didn’t make “to need” a gerund. Let’s change that now, substituting the noun “need” for the gerund “a needing”
i have a needing to be bathroom using
5) Informalize “have”
A classic, if you’ve ever been around native English speakers. You can just replace “have” with “got” when it’s referring to possesion and people will get it! Makes you sound cool imo, like you know you’re breaking a rule but because you understand the intent it’s a flourish.
i got a needing to be bathroom using
6) Simplify out “a”
Another informal transformation, definitely approaching the limits of modern slang by doing this. A more standard version is the one applied to get rid of “some” in the plural version: compare “i got some cats” -> “i got cats” to “i got a cat” -> “i got cat”
i got needing to be bathroom using
7) Simplify out “to be”
No standard English rules let us do this actually. However, because it’s English, we can also just make up rules on the fly and if sounds ok then it works.
One way of reasoning about this is that because “to be” is connecting “needing” (verb in gerund form that we are going to treat like a verb) with “bathroom using” (noun gerund compound), the latter counts as an object for the verb, and we can simplify the progressive tense back out. Simpler analouge is that “i need to be eating” can be simplified to “i need eating” with roughly the same message coming across.
Another way to view this is creating an illegal gerund noun gerund compound that doesn’t exist anywhere else4 in English, out of existing words in the sentence, that is now being possessed by “got”. There is less rationale for this other than i think it sounds cool.
And that, my friends, is how we end up with the beautiful phrase,
i got needing bathroom using
As my linguist friend points out, this is just one of many ways you can get to this end sentence. We just plotted out this path as the most likely to fit with our mental models. (There’s also a path where you can accidentally turn “have” used as an auxiliary verb into “got” but that doesn’t make any sense and also this post is too long already)
anyways thank you for coming to my TED talk
Also big thank-you to my linguistics friend who helped me fact-check and review this post! Ur the best bestie!!