A most peculiar locution

Under a spreading chestnut-tree
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands.
                               -- Circa 1840, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

When poets use it, it can be an effective device: "The smith, a mighty man is he ..."

In the hands of ordinary mortals, however, this grammatical construction sounds archaic and ... odd.

But nowadays I hear it popping up, often several times in the same story, from a couple of reporters on TV newscasts here in Richmond.

"Of course those budget talks, they cannot be ignored." (Jerrita Patterson, WTVR, May 24, 2012)

"The family, they are still out of their home this morning." (Deon Guillory, WWBT TV, June 6, 2012)

"The details, they are still coming in." (Jerrita Patterson, WTVR, May 31, 2012)

"Rescue crews, they're still looking for anyone who may be trapped inside." (Greg McQuade, June 24, 2012)

And those are just the examples I happened to hear while I had a pen and paper handy.

I've taken to calling it the puerile appositive. And the puerile appositive, it is everywhere. (Forgive me.)

The juxtaposition of a noun and a pronoun that mean the same thing, as in "The Richmond School Board, they want to hear your thoughts" (Jerrita Patterson, May 29, 2012) is a waste of words, childlike and foolish. What's the point? Just say what you mean: The Richmond School Board wants to hear your thoughts." What's the point of the pseudo-explanatory "they?"

(We'll leave for a later discussion the fact that the school board is an "it," not a "they." Let's just tackle one problem at a time.)

A friend who knows well how to use words suggests that what I call the puerile appositive is most often used by speakers of English as a second language or by very young children who are still working out how to construct full sentences. Another grammarian told me it is almost, but not quite, a "clitic left dislocation." (I'm not certain what that means in everyday words, so I simply nodded sagely.)

But whatever it is, it's annoying.

Unless you're Longfellow, circa 1840.

And there is no local TV reporter who is even remotely able to use the language as deftly as Longfellow did.