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Using -ed vs. -ing in the “needs washed” construction

I used "revisited" in a sentence not unlike this:

In the past we decided policy X should be applied to certain types of users.

I wonder if this needs revisited?

The word revisited was corrected to revisiting:

I wonder if this needs revisiting?

I then did a search to find out what the difference in usage between the two words are and found these examples:

Revisited

  • Revisited at a future meeting.
  • Revisited regularly through out the school year.
  • Revisited in the future.

Revisiting

  • Revisiting the dream.
  • Revisiting the treaty at such length, but will instead give a useful overview of its contents.
  • Tired of constantly revisiting sites to check for new articles?

Is revisited used when it's something you do in the future, but revisiting is something you are doing at a current or past point of time?

I felt the original usage was fine because I didn't expect the "revisit" to happen immediately?

For clarity, I am a British English user (Scottish to be more precise).

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Kev
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    This sounds like an instance of the "needs washed" construction, meaning that it is grammatically only correct regionally—specifically, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. – Peter Shor Jan 28 '12 at 14:13
  • @PeterShor - understood, have flagged to close as dupe if this is the case and it certainly looks like it. – Kev Jan 28 '12 at 14:27
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    @PeterShor: Given that OP hails from Ireland, not Pennsylvania, I think the short answer is "revisited" is just plain wrong - it should be "needs to be revisited". So I'm voting to close as "general reference". – FumbleFingers Jan 28 '12 at 14:57
  • @FumbleFingers - I'm actually technically a Scot (or a British citizen), I only moved to Ireland a couple of years ago so haven't had my english language usage affected but my present geographical location. – Kev Jan 28 '12 at 15:00
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    @PeterShor: I'm not quite sure it is a dupe. That question, as well as the "related" links provided in a comment, refer to an anomaly of the dialect used by natives of central Pennsylvania. – Robusto Jan 28 '12 at 15:04
  • @Kev: I see no evidence that you're not a fluent user of English, so what I don't understand is how you come to be uncertain over this usage. My understanding is that the "needs washed" pattern linked by Peter is a highly regionalised dialect that normally grates on the ear of anyone unfamiliar with it. If you don't like the gerund "revisiting" for some reason, why are you not instantly drawn to endorsing "needs to be revisited"? – FumbleFingers Jan 28 '12 at 15:17
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    Why not needs revising or needs to be revised. – mplungjan Jan 28 '12 at 15:25
  • @mplungjan - that's not what I was asking, I didn't use those words, hence my question about revisited vs revisiting. – Kev Jan 28 '12 at 15:26
  • I understand, but to me it makes more sense and answers your question since it matches revisiting/needs to be revisited – mplungjan Jan 28 '12 at 15:31
  • @FumbleFingers - despite english being my native tongue, I never paid much attention to grammar, and failed quite badly at it in school, especially written english. Maybe that answer is a distraction from my question which is about temporal use. – Kev Jan 28 '12 at 15:33
  • @Kev: Yes, well I understand how you could have an issue with the tense - so you're iffy about revisiting because that seems to reference the present, when you're actually talking about a future activity. Although your reservations are misplaced, I sorta see how you get there. But surely you must hear constructions like "Something needs to be done" all the time? Is it something to do with the fact that "revisiting" implies a different tense to "visiting", because it implies an "original visit" sometime in the past? – FumbleFingers Jan 28 '12 at 15:44
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    @FumbleFingers: According to Grammar Girl, the needs washed construction is also used in parts of Scotland and Northern Ireland, which is presumably where Pittsburgh got it from. So this is indeed an instance of it. – Peter Shor Jan 28 '12 at 16:50
  • @Peter Shor: I hadn't registered that before, but yes - it's therefore a dup, so the closevotes are correct. I see my erroneous classification as "general reference" has been swamped by "dup", but that's just as well really! – FumbleFingers Jan 28 '12 at 16:57
  • @FumbleFingers: I didn't know that either until Googling just now, actually. – Peter Shor Jan 28 '12 at 17:01
  • @Peter Shor: I think because America is bigger, it's probably not unusual for regional dialectal variants to have crossed the Atlantic and survived in isolated pockets in their new territory, where in many cases they'll have died out in the homeland on account of increasing inter-community contact. Some parts of Scotland and Ireland have been pretty insular until fairly recently, but I'd expect that to have applied far more in America. – FumbleFingers Jan 28 '12 at 17:12

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