Am. Did.
The verb ‘being a regular pedant’ conjugates like this.
I am a regular pedant
You are an irregular pedant regularly wrong
He/she/it is an illiterate ignoramus.
(Edited to improve on the original.)
At times like these, the Urban Dictionary may be helpful:
Yeah, I guess us poor rural folks need a translation service.
(Seriously - I’d like to see a proper Rural Dictionary - and not the UD’s version )
In seriousness, I believe the implied noun is “schedule.”
Needs an indefinite article, then.
…'on the regular schedule" - WHAT regular schedule?
…‘on a regular schedule’ - makes some sense.
So ‘on the reg’ may apparently be a new usage, but it makes no grammatical sense if we attempt to parse it into a more standardised grammatical form.
You know how there are lots of cars, but people still say things like “I’m going to take the car”, because they’re so used to the one it makes sense to give it a definite article? That’s what happened here. The schedule is so regular there is no longer any question about which one you mean.
Saying ‘I’m going to take the car’ is either simply using ‘the’ to make ‘car’ generic, or because it is ‘the car’ i.e. ‘my car’ not ‘a’ car or any random car.
Does this chunk of rock have a generic schedule? Saying ‘on its reg’ might have worked, as a variation of this phrase. But I thought ‘on the reg’ simply meant regularly.
Which one we mean? On a chunk of rock we’ve only just discovered? Which can only have one schedule, anyway? Again, I thought Pesco was just trying to say regularly. He wasn’t using some shorthand for ‘on the regular schedule’.
Look, I get that this ugly neologism is now apparently common usage in some parts, even if it is grammatical nonsense. Many such phrases are. Trying to justify it grammatically, though, is a bit fruitless.
I think you’re losing the grammar fight. “On the regular schedule” is grammatically sound even if the sentence is poorly constructed due to the missing antecedent.
You don’t like this turn of phrase. It’s okay.
I’m sorry, are you now saying that Pesco’s use of ‘on the reg’ was indeed an abbreviation for ‘on the regular schedule’ (as if this would have made sense, anyway) and it is not now the case ‘on the reg’ is shorthand for regularly?
This moon does whatever it does ‘on the regular schedule’ does it? What/which/whose regular schedule is that? Orbits may be regular and predictable intervals, but they are not scheduled (unless you use schedule to refer to natural events determined by the laws of physics).
And I rather doubt that people who do now use 'on the ‘reg’ as a common phrase do so to imply they follow a schedule. The word regularly may imply a schedule, with predictable intervals, but when someone says they go come here ‘on the reg’ they almost certainly mean often, and not according to a given schedule.
I may have lost the usage fight, and by implication the meaning debate (‘on the reg’ has been coined, and is now used, to mean regularly - I do not like it, as you correctly surmise) but your trying to convince me it really is grammatically sound by saying it actually means ‘on the regular schedule’ simply does not convince at all.
Perhaps we should stop now.
@capnjimbo was sorta right, but in this case it definitely means on the regolith.
So in this case it’s an adjective?
Ah, I see.
a 165-foot rock that swings around the Earth on the reg, sometimes just 9 million miles from us.
That damn lunar dust gets everywhere!
It could well be, yes.
As in ‘regular visitor’.
Say “I don’t know how historical linguistics works” (or “I am deliberately misinterpreting how it works for pseudo-humerous effect”) without using those words.
Are you really trying to tell the English that they’re Englishing wrong?
I’m trying to tell the Americans that they are British Englishing wrong.
Careful…
Indeed. I was just going to edit my post to say something similar. Who is English here?
I know I am. I have no certain knowledge as to the Englishness of others intent on telling me I should not object to this North American usage, but I suspect there is not much of it around and it is mostly Americanness. And I have been shown and conceded it IS widely used in NA, but apparently some are intent on justifying this usage by trying to insist it really is grammatical. Why not just admit that grammatically it is nonsense (as many such neologism are)?
Anyway, it is late here and I will soon go to my bed, as I do on the reg at around this time of day. G’night.