Does this grammatical "error" need TO BE stopped?

Does your car need washed? Or does it need to be washed? To be or not to be, indeed!

I think I was pretty gracious when I surrendered the moral high ground on the proper usage of “hopefully”. I’m not ready to be gracious on this one, though. A growing splinter group of English speakers have vandalized our language by dropping “to be” when they are speaking. Where any normal person says, “The dishes need to be washed”, these syntactic libertarians take a shortcut to, “These dishes need washed.”

I don’t like it. It sounds like your voice blinked. It’s a glitch! Max Headroom lives.

I did a little research, and this glitch has a name, a place, and a history. That doesn’t make it any more tolerable, though.

Dropping the “to be” is called “infinitive copula deletion”. Truly. When I first read that, I thought some brilliant linguist was calling it “the deletion of the f-ing infinitive”, but it turns out “copula” doesn’t really mean copulation. It means linking - which is kind of the same but not quite there.

Anyhow, it turns out that, according to the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project, the usage varies by geography. I don’t recall EVER hearing it when I was growing up, but I was raised by proper-speaking parents, and reinforced by nuns at school.

Yale also reports that the glitch comes from Scots and Northern Irish. As someone raised in a proudly Irish Catholic household, I am required by ancestral bylaw to be suspicious of anything traced to Scots or Northern Irish usage. Nobody seems to know exactly why it flourished where it did, so I am choosing to blame ornery regional stubbornness. Let’s stop it before it spreads further.

Really, it would be kind of you to interrupt and correct anybody who uses the infinitive copula deletion. Make a big scene, if you can. Having taken a big L on the proper meaning of “hopefully”, I could really use a big W on this one.