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Question about "You xyz are ..." (leminal.space)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by ell1e@leminal.space to c/linguistics@mander.xyz

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My apologies, since this post actually contains a swear word, id...t, which I'm going to censor. But this came up with a test reader of a text I'm working on:

You id...t actually find her fascinating, don’t you?

A test reader thought this sounded weird and unusual. So I went to research uses by others, and indeed, almost nobody says this!

This confuses me, since I find tons of uses of:

This id...t actually is...
These id...ts actually are...
You id...ts actually are....

...but not for this singular form as a direct address.

Is there something grammatically wrong with it? Is it valid, but for some reason people prefer You id...t, you actually are... anyway?

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