Put the lottery on

As you know, I'm a big fan of just listening out for interesting linguistic usages, anything that catches the ear or eye. So recently, when I was gently ridiculed for saying I might put the lottery on, and that 'everyone' says play the lottery, I was intrigued. To me, the way I said it was entirely natural and although I could say it the other way too, I didn't think it was true that 'everyone' says it that way. 

So of course I turned to that immediate arbiter of linguistic conundra, Facebook, and asked my friends to settle the question. The first few that responded agreed that I was weird for saying it that way, which obviously wasn't the response I was hoping for, so I asked for some northerners to chip in. And there it was: an almost categorical divide between people in Northeast England, and everyone else. 

A regional difference that no one has (to my knowledge) noticed before! This is my bread and butter. You're welcome. 

They call it

I noticed a thing the other day. It's a thing I've noticed about the Northeast (English) dialect before (specifically, I've noticed it in the Ashington dialect), but then I heard someone from Sheffield do it too, so maybe it's more widespread in the north.

What I noticed was that where I would say

It's called...

some people would say

They call it...

The exact context was that on Pointless, a contestant was trying to think of Adam Sandler films. He was trying to think of 50 First Dates, though he thought it was called 42 Dates, and he said

There's one, they call it 42 Dates.

This is not a part of my dialect at all, despite having lived in the north east most of my life, and it's sufficiently salient for me to be blogging about, but it's not unusual. I've also heard people introducing a character to the discourse who needs to be contextualised like this:

Margaret's son, I think they call him Michael, works in Asda now. 

For me, they call him has to have a sort of habitual meaning (the action happens habitually, on many separate occasions). To get the stative interpretation (he is in a state of being called Michael) I need to say He is called, where the verb is passive and the subject the person in question. But for these speakers, they call him, with an active verb with generic subject they, can have the stative reading.

Interestingly, it is always they as the subject, never people or any other subject meaning 'everyone in general'. This suggests that it's a fixed expression, they call NP (or perhaps it has to be a pronoun, though I think not), with they an impersonal pronoun like one.