William Safire, “On Language: I Don’t Do ‘Do’” (New York Times Magazine, Apr. 12, 2009).
I ran this speculation past Ben Zimmer of visualthesaurus.com, who replied: “I think your hunch is correct about the provenance of the ‘I don’t do X’ phrasal template. There must have been a major influence from the stereotypical maid’s stipulation, ‘I don’t do windows,’ which attained catchphrase status by the mid-1970s as a staple of sitcoms and cartoons.”
But does the ready acceptance of this “phrasal template” mean we are living in syntax, undermining the rules of order and word relationships in sentence structure on which we base our grammar? “An interesting syntactic aspect is that the complement of do, regardless of whether it’s a noun or adjective, can take on a highly abstract quality,” Zimmer said. “When Larry Summers said, ‘I don’t do ticktock,’ he was taking the journalistic sense of ‘ticktock’ and abstracting it into a mass noun for the disclosure of behind-the-scenes gossip.”
Read the rest here.