So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

[LizzieMaine]

One thing Ive noticed is the widespread Internet use of "y'all" by people, usually kids, who've never been anywhere near the South and have no Southern antecedents. My niece, whose New England roots are as deep as my own, and who has never been further south than New York City, "y'alls" all the time on social media. Just another example of "creeping Southernification" in action.

 

[Bamaboots]

Just another example of "creeping Southernification" in action.

We're taking y'all over, Lizzie.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Youse guys need to know The North Will Rise Again.

 

[BlueTrain]

Someone, not sure who (Maybe Horace Kephart) was writing about those who lived in the Southern Appalachians and he was writing in dialect, meaning he wrote words phonetically the way they were actually spoken. One of the local natives once read what had been written and simply said that the writer couldn't spell.

I think I've mentioned somewhere already that we all easily and without thinking modify our speech to suit the circumstances. We don't talk the same way to everyone everywhere. We can vary our accent some and we usually use a slightly different vocabulary. Some people don't, of course, but they don't know no better and they ain't got no education.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Eye dialect," often used by writers of early 20th Century comic or "local color" fiction, is usually quite different from genuine spoken dialect. It was common for "eye dialect" writers to use words like "wuz" instead of "was," or "wimmin" instead of "women," even though there was no difference between Standard English and the dialect in question in the way those words were pronounced. When you see "eye dialect," you know you're looking at the work of someone who doesn't actually understand the rules of the dialect they're trying to imitate. You see a lot of this sort of thing in Western pulp stories written by authors who were never west of Schenectady in their lives.

There was a subgenre of "local color" fiction that purported to show the lives of rural New Englanders, and had them saying things like "ye" instead of "you." We don't ever say "ye" unless we're mocking "Ye Olde Quainte Shoppe" signs in tourist-trap towns. We pronounce "you" as "yah," or "yeh," not "yee."

 

[Fading Fast]

^^^ I'm a bit confused by your post. What is "eye dialect -" spelling a word incorrectly to reflect the way it is actually pronounced by "locals?"

So, for example, some people from Brooklyn and elsewhere used to (and some still do) pronounce the world "ask" as "ax." So, if I was writing to reflect how a person from Brooklyn pronounces the word "ask" and wrote, "He 'axed' me a question" would that be correct "eye dialect" as it does reflect the way the world is pronounced?

Would not spelling "ask" as it is pronounced, say spelling it like "axis me" in my example, be the error you're referring to above as my spelling doesn't reflect how the word is truly pronounced?

 

[ChiTownScion]

In the Northeast, it's "*youse* guys."

And the south side of Chicago. Usually forgoing the "guys."

 

[HudsonHawk]

Interesting. I was told by a "Southerner" several years ago that "y'all" is only used when addressing two or more people, and never when addressing only one person.

Must have been a poseur.

 

[ChiTownScion]

One thing Ive noticed is the widespread Internet use of "y'all" by people, usually kids, who've never been anywhere near the South and have no Southern antecedents. My niece, whose New England roots are as deep as my own, and who has never been further south than New York City, "y'alls" all the time on social media. Just another example of "creeping Southernification" in action.

I see a typed "y'all" on an internet post, and it's like the proverbial nails on a blackboard. I immediately flash to the image, "hayseed." I usually retort with, "Yawl is a two masted vessel: YOU is the second person subjective case pronoun- singular or plural."

Same with "there" for "their" or "they're," "your" for "you're," etc. Call me a Grammar Nazi, but nuns used to clobber your hand with a ruler for less when I was growing up. And it usually appears in heated discussions over religion or politics. If they're trying to persuade me as to the prudence of their position, bad usage or spelling really is not the way to accomplish that end.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

I still use yáll because it's useful. Modern English has no second person plural pronoun, just "you" for both singular and plural. We used to have one: "ye" as in old formulae like "Hear ye, hear ye." It was the plural of "thou." We stopped using thou so we stopped using ye.

 

[LizzieMaine]

^^^ I'm a bit confused by your post. What is "eye dialect -" spelling a word incorrectly to reflect the way it is actually pronounced by "locals?"

So, for example, some people from Brooklyn and elsewhere used to (and some still do) pronounce the world "ask" as "ax." So, if I was writing to reflect how a person from Brooklyn pronounces the word "ask" and wrote, "He 'axed' me a question" would that be correct "eye dialect" as it does reflect the way the world is pronounced?

Would not spelling "ask" as it is pronounced, say spelling it like "axis me" in my example, be the error you're referring to above as my spelling doesn't reflect how the word is truly pronounced?

"Eye dialect" is the intentional misspelling of words that *aren't* pronounced differently in a dialect. For example, cartoonist Willard Mullin used to draw his Brooklyn Bum saying something like "We wuz t'rowed outa da jernt." In that sentence, "wuz" is eye-dialect, used to make the sentence look more non-standard than it is, because a Flatbush "was" was no different from a Beacon Hill "was." "T'rowed outa da jernt," however, is *not* eye dialect, because it's a reasonably accurate transcription of how that sentence would sound in 1930s Brookynese. Along the same lines, when sportswriters quoted Casey Stengel as saying something like "we wuz gonna give him a piece of cake, but we wuz afraid he'd drop it," the "wuz" is pure eye dialect. Stengel never pronounced "was" any other way but "was," but using "wuz" makes him seem more Stengelish and clown-like.

A lot of 19th century humorist/authors like Artemus Ward and George Ade were known for using "eye dialect." Joel Chandler Harris, on the other hand, didn't use "eye dialect" in his Uncle Remus tales -- he was making an effort to capture a literal transcription of the plantation-era dialect that survived in his time.

Sometimes this sort of thing overlaps -- when you read the WPA Slave Narratives of the 1930s, the authors were instructed to transcribe the dialect as accurately as possible. But they weren't dialect experts, so they'd often slip in "eye dialect" where they shouldn't have.

 

[Fading Fast]

^^^ As always, awesome, informative and detailed explanation. Thank you.

 

[Fading Fast]

I thought about a new thread - "So Trivial but it makes you the opposite of ticked off -" but realized that is why I never went into marketing. Kidding aside, I had an experience that is the opposite of what we normally write about here.

Netflix is raising its price on its DVD monthly service. Not only did they send us an email in June clearly stating that the price is going up and why, every time I log onto Netflix, they also have a message about the price increase - which, for me, will start August 1st. Even their explanation isn't obnoxious - they explain how long my price has been at the level it is, how costs are rising for content and, therefore, my monthly fee is going up by $2 - not outrageous.

This is a decent way to have a price increase. Notify the customer well in advance - and continue alerting them to it - and explain it in a non-obnoxious manner. They aren't hiding it, being tricky about it or blaming everyone else (yes, they mention content expense rising but not in a "not our fault - hate someone else" way). So trivial but it doesn't tick me off, it actually makes me respect Netflix more.

 

[EngProf]

Like I wrote, we don't write it, we say it. What you've got there is the apostrophe representing the missing "o" in one of my alternate, you should pardon the expression, spellings of it.

As a native whose family lived there since the mid 19th Century, by the mid-20th Century both "yins" and "youns" were semantically and socially equivalent pronunciations. It doesn't take much imagination or insight to see that both are contractions of "you ones".

In the days of Shakespeare, English had distinct singular and plural second personal pronoun forms (e.g., thee vs. you [objective case], thy vs. your, thou vs. you [nominative]). In the later 17th century, the singular forms disappeared and the plural forms stepped in for both.

Ever since we've been trying to reconstitute the distinctions with varying degrees of success with "y'all" vs. "all y'all" or "youze" vs. "youzes", for example.

"Ever since we've been trying to reconstitute the distinctions with varying degrees of success with "y'all" vs. "all y'all"..."

As a very-long-term Southerner, I would perceive a difference in friendliness and intent between "y'all" and "all y'all". In the first case it's friendly - "Y'all come to see us when you can." (As in the song...)
In the second case (less friendly) I can see a Southern drill sergeant saying to his troops, "All uh y'all" better get on the stick or I'll start kicking a**** and taking names." The "uh" (of) is slightly spoken.

Personally I NEVER use the term since it's too much associated with negative Southern stereotypes and I truly despise those.
(Is the phrase "get on the stick" used outside the South?)

 

[tonyb]

I see a typed "y'all" on an internet post, and it's like the proverbial nails on a blackboard. I immediately flash to the image, "hayseed." I usually retort with, "Yawl is a two masted vessel: YOU is the second person subjective case pronoun- singular or plural."

Same with "there" for "their" or "they're," "your" for "you're," etc. Call me a Grammar Nazi, but nuns used to clobber your hand with a ruler for less when I was growing up. And it usually appears in heated discussions over religion or politics. If they're trying to persuade me as to the prudence of their position, bad usage or spelling really is not the way to accomplish that end.

I frequently use nonstandard grammar, but I (almost) always know I am doing it, and I know why.

Any person who has taken a linguistics survey course conducted by a competent teacher should come away knowing the difference between descriptive and prescriptive grammar, and that all grammars (languages as they are naturally spoken) are equally rule governed. They are all internally consistent.

Had the educators in Oakland a couple of decades back called their proposed course "The Grammatical Structure of Spoken African-American English" rather than "Ebonics," a whole lot of misunderstanding might have been avoided.

Like you, I can't abide misspellings and misusages -- those of the "sight, site, cite" variety, as well as lexical items used in a way inconsistent with commonly accepted definitions. I find the latter most annoying when the misused word is of the five-dollar variety.

I find both misspellings and misusages indicative of mental laziness. Every person with a smartphone has several reference libraries in his pocket. If he is unsure of a spelling or definition, he can easily look up the word. Easily.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Dialects are a wonderful thing, and should be preserved, not eradicated. One of my prize posessions is a translation of part of the New Testament into the Gullah dialect of the Sea Islands of South Carolina -- at first glance, if you don't understand what it is, it's bizarre. But if you understand that it's an actual language variation with its own rules and its own syntax, it's quite beautiful.

I have no shame in my own dialect, whether it's the traditional Maine accent I grew up with or the amalgam of Maine/Boston/New York that it's evolved into as I've gotten older. I had to suppress it during my radio career, except for comic effect, but I see no reason to do so now unless I'm standing on a platform delivering a lecture or a speech. If anybody's got a problem with the way I talk in everyday settings, ain't that just too friggin' bad.

 

[2jakes]

Based on a film regarding the Strand.
The way you talk and the information you provided
was very enjoyable.
Thank you.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Ah yes, my radio voice in action. That was eight or nine years ago, back when film still existed and all was right with the world.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Another good one:

Leaving your flat for a bicycle-drive, already closed the door and got your shoes on, beeing happy and suddenly realize: "Damn, sunglasses forgotten!" So back in my flat.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Or when you leave your house without your sunglasses figuring it's rainy and foggy and dark out, and then five minutes down the road the sun comes out in full force.