Is this a new speech construction? It feels off to me. But I keep hearing it especially in the last couple of years.

Submitted by flabberghaster in ask (edited )

I've been noticing often lately a strange speech construction. It goes like:

"[...] when we notice an actor who we can't quite place how we know them"

"[...] a type of fruit that we don't know where it comes from"

IE, a subclause that works as an adjective describing a noun, but the description uses a pronoun for the thing in question that to me seems redundant. I would say

"when we notice an actor who we can't quite place how we know" or "a type of fruit that we don't know where is from"

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SWORDSCROSSED wrote

I think your second example sounds very wrong to me, I’d have to reword it like “a type of fruit we don’t know the origin of”

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flabberghaster OP wrote

Yeah I edited it. I messed that up. I changed it to "a type of fruit that we don't know where is from"

Is that any less ungrammatical to your ear?

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Dogmantra wrote

I think this has existed for a while, at least when I do it it mostly comes from restructuring the sentence halfway through, yknow when you start going without knowing exactly how you're going to finish?

e.g. in your examples, it would be "a type of fruit that [pause] we don't know where it comes from"

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twovests wrote

Can you give an example in a full sentence? (gen)

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flabberghaster OP wrote

The full context of the first was like "It gives us the same strange out of place feeling as when we see an actor who we can't quite place how we know them."

The second clause describing the actor feels redundant to me, it feels very awkward. Having the pronoun for the same subject in there feels weird. "An actor that ..." Means that ... Is specifically referring to the actor. Then we have "... we don't know where we know them" feels like a whole new sentence with its own subject and object. It feels unrelated to me. The them is redundant, to me.

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twovests wrote

So I don't know grammar good enough to know what a clause is, and I grew up where people didn't always speak "standard" english in the first place, so grain of salt, but it sounds fine to me.

I'd say "where we know them from" but that only sounds a smidge more standard

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