Ergatives in English: grammatical dinosaurs?

English is full of ergative verbs—verbs whose semantic objects appear as their subjects:

• The door slammed shut.
• That's the way the cookie crumbles.
• The cat knocked the glass off the table and it broke.

The verbs slam, crumble, break are all good, solid, uncontroversial transitive verbs.

For those of you who've forgotten, or who never knew (or who never cared), transitive verbs are verbs that take objects. That is, they name actions that happen to something or someone. Destroy is a transitive verb because when it shows up, the thing destroyed also has to be mentioned. "The marauders destroyed the farming village" is a fine sentence, but "The marauders destroyed" isn't. It's lopsided. It leaves us hanging, just waiting. "Yes? They destroyed... what?" English speakers know that the object just has to be there. (Not all English speakers know the terms transitive and object, of course, but they understand the concepts, and they know which verbs are—or can be—transitive and (at least sometimes) require objects. Which is why "The marauders destroyed" sounds weird to English speakers.)

What's interesting is that the grammatical subjects of those verbs—the door, the cookie, and the glass—are the objects of the actions. The door didn't slam something shut; it was slammed shut. The cookie didn't crumble something; it got crumbled. And the glass didn't break anything; it was broken. In these sentences, semantic objects show up as grammatical subjects. By the way, English isn't alone in using this kind of construction, called the ergative.

You see it in sentences like these too:

• Sure, the car's got more than 300,000 miles on her, but she handles like a dream. (The car is the thing being handled, not the thing handling something else.)
• You're wasting your time, Bruno. That safe won't crack without dynamite. (The safe is the thing being—or not being—cracked, not the thing cracking something else.)
• This bushel of kale will cook up nicely. (The kale is the stuff being cooked, not the thing cooking something else.)
• My grandma was a tough old thing who didn't scare easily. (It's not that she has a hard time scaring people—it's not easy to scare her.)
• After lots of huffing and puffing, the Big Bad Wolf knew the brick house just wouldn't blow down. (You get it.) 
• A watched pot never boils.
• That paper cut will heal in no time.

This kind of sentence is all around. I never thought there was anything too remarkable about them until a while back my son claimed that some ergative construction I had used was bizarre. "No one says things like that!" he declared with all the certainty of a too-bright then-11-year-old. I came up with example after example of everyday ergatives, and he insisted that he'd never heard anyone say anything like them.

"There used to be a stupid advertising slogan about 'the soup that eats like a meal,'" I told him.

He was unimpressed, and he held his ground. "Kids do not say stuff like that!"

Is he right? And if so, what does that mean? Does it mean ergatives are on the way out? In 50 years, will sentences like those noted above (or even ones like "The new Claude Clodworthy novel is a turgid read"—suggesting to the linguistically naive that the novel reads something, instead of being something people read) sound hopelessly obsolete? Are ergatives going the way of whom?

Or are ergatives just not part of kids' linguistic arsenal? (Kids don't say notwithstanding or fiduciary too often either, but we don't take that as evidence that those grown-up words are on their last legs.) Maybe English speakers just have to grow into ergatives the same way people have to grow into calculus and a nuanced appreciation of Claude Clodworthy.

Or maybe the kid is just full of it.