Magnet #689 - GeorgiaState crop: Peanut
State fruit: Peach
I want to say that this was given to me by a friend of mine that lived in Atlanta...or, it's quite possible that I picked it up myself. I can't tell if this magnet it's cute, or too stereotypical.
I just kinda like it cuz of the y'all.
Ya'll is pretty funny word - some folks can carry it off, some can't.
Some spell it ya'll. Some spell it y'all.
And, some folk use ya'll when addressing more than one person, and some use it even when addressing one person.
It's that last one that makes my head spin - drives me batty to hear someone approach one person and go, "How ya'll doin' today?" It's weird. After all ya'll is short for "you all" and if there's one person, where's the all in that?
Eh, at this point, I'm thinking I've devoted way too much thought to the use of y'all or ya'll. And I suppose all of ya'll would agree.
Right?
Ya'll?
7 comments:
You've piqued the interest of the linguistics major in me.
1) Why isn't there isn't a similar first-person plural construction? No one says "w'all" for "we all".
E.g., "Are y'all heading to the diner tonight?" "Nope. W'all staying in and ordering a pizza. Y'all care to join us?"
2) "All y'all". Where did the "of" go in "all of you all", and why the redundancy?
3) What possesses natives of Western Pennsylvania to use "yinz" or "yunz" as a substitute for "y'all"? Seriously, it exists.
4) My spell-check is okay with "y'all" but not with "ya'll". I sense discrimination.
There's an entire dissertation in the derivation of colloquial forms of the familiar second-person pronoun, historically and phonologically and sociologically.
*handflappy* Thanks for the linguistics fun. [/nerd]
Yinz? Yunz? Gin, yunz just blew my mind. I think the of and the ou went to grab a bite to eat. I like all y'all. Like it in theory, and know it means everybody, whereas y'all could just be a small subset of everyone (or it could be everyone, too). But I can rarely bring myself to use all y'all.
Speaking of people who can't pull it off, my mom is one of those. She's lived in Texas 26 years, but she still doesn't get it. Y'all is supposed to be a gentle drawl, but when she says it (to practice) it just sounds angry. YAWL. Nope. It makes me glad I was born here. I can y'all 'til the cows come home.
(Phooey, how do I change my name without making it not a link?)
Kimberly, your blogger profile has your blog name as your name. My blogger profile has "Gin" as my name, which links it when I use it to id my posts. [/is that what you were asking?]
Over the holidays, we had a trivial pursuit question about the plural of y'all. My mom and cousin had a great debate over whether it was a trick question (and the answer was y'all) or whether it was something like y'alls.
All the while my brain was going "It's all y'all!"
Y'all are entertaining as all heck!
Thanks to all ya'll for commenting, yinz is da best.
@gin, re: question #2, "All ya'll": I really think that the "of" is sort of in the drawl of the "all." At least it is when I say it. Heh.
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