English Language & Usage Asked on July 1, 2021
Watching A Stranger Among Us, I noticed that Melanie Griffith twice asked
I recognise this as an American construction which sounds strange to me — Brits invariably say either “What have you got?” or “What do you have?”. But I’d be interested to know if it’s considered “normal” by most/all Americans, or if it’s regionally or otherwise restricted.
Gimme a break.
In this instance, "What do you got" is a false orthographicalization of colloquial "Whadayagot", which in turn is a perfectly normal elision of formal "What have you got". A step less elided would be "What've you got"; a step more elided would be "Whatchagot?"
It only looks strange or improper because the writer/transcriber made it look so. A similarly imputed impropriety occurs with the spelling of 've as of: "If I'd known you were coming I'd of baked a cake."
Correct answer by StoneyB on hiatus on July 1, 2021
The single most famous instance of "Whaddaya got" in U.S. popular culture is probably the exchange between Mildred (Peggy Maley) and Johnny Strabler (Marlon Brando) in The Wild One (1953):
Mildred: Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?
Johnny: Whadda you got?
That spelling is the Internet Movie Database's, by the way—Brando doesn't pronounce the "you" as "yoo"; in fact, he pronounces "Whaddaya" more like "Wudduhyuh."
The spelling "What do you got" remains somewhat uncommon in Google Books results and goes back only to about 1990, though both Philip Roth (in I Married a Communist [1998] and The Plot Against America [2004]) and Tom Clancy (in Rainbow Six [1999] and The Bear and the Dragon [2001]) have used it. I've also noticed that in a popular U.S. comic strip, Pearls Before Swine, the cartoonist sometimes sets up a joke in the first panel by having one character ask another, e.g., "What do you got there, Rat?" It looks odd to me. I'm fairly sure, though, that usage of "What do you got" in written U.S. English has increased significantly since the turn of the century.
The first written instance of the phrase that I've been able to find is in a joke from 1915, and the spelling used is "whaddya got." From The Judge, volume 68 (subsequently reprinted in scads of periodicals over the next decade, and as late as 1960 in The Complete Toastmaster: A New Treasury for Speakers):
Tourist (in village notion store)—Whaddya got in the shape of automobile tires?
Saleslady—Funeral wreaths, life preservers, invalid cushions, and doughnuts.
They sure don't write 'em like that any more.
Answered by Sven Yargs on July 1, 2021
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