I support you and wish to extend your prohibition to Internet reaction gifs and tweets.
Middle aged white people on twitter who try to sound hip by using y'all are the most annoying of all.
Ok, here's my litmus test: if your mother says "y'all", you can say "y'all". Otherwise, try "you all" on for size.
This all has something to do with people trying to project connection with the white working class, right?
They should really just say that as a collective pronoun. "Are all of us working class white people hungry?"
It sounds dumb from some a y'all but not all a y'all.
Obvsly.
I grew up saying y'all. When I moved to Idaho as a baby professor, and said it to the students there, they all found it hilarious.
Wasn't born in the South. I grew up in Northern Ohio and said "you all." But I have spent 45 years below the Mason-Dixon line, and about 17 years in the Real-No-Kidding South (Southwest Tennessee and North Mississippi.) I use "y'all" and "ain't" on occasion.
These are good and useful words, and any complaints about them are rooted in contempt for the common folk of the South. (Do these regular people deserve contempt? I take no position. I report, you decide.)
No! It's rooted in contempt for how unnatural these carpet-baggers sound! I am but a white working class stiff. Sort of working, at least. White, yes.
I have said y'all since I began talking, but am quite confident in the appropriateness of my usage.
(NB: I lived in Kentucky [by way of Alabama] until I was 3, and in NC for the next 50 years, so.)
13: Ah, but you gave yourself away in the original post:
I grew up in the South and I have always felt like a dumbass saying it! (I did in fact say it in high school and part of college. But I knew deep down that it was forced and unnatural.)
Smart, tolerant, cosmopolitan folks such as yourself don't speak like Southerners regardless of where they grew up. Or if they do speak like Southerners, they not only sound like dopes, but like inauthentic dopes.
She didn't grow up in the real south. Florida is Florida.
I use it sometimes. And yinz, too. And yous. I sound dumb and the yinz in particular is stolen valor but so it goes. They call attention to the plurality in a way that you all doesn't and reinforce a formality level without the problems of my native you guys, which I also use on occasion.
You guys know we only talk like that in mixed company. When it's just us in a room, it's all "thee" and "thou" in iambic pentameter.
17: I think you just called me a rootless cosmopolitan?
Wouldn't it be more inclusive to say x'all instead?
23: If you speak Xhosa, sure. But the click languages are hard for westerners.
I'm just finding the idea hilarious, that we must impress upon the white working class that they must use x'all in the name of gender equality. Talk about a war on Christmas.
19: Pardon. I was attempting to convey heebie's elitist attitude, not my own.
22: We report. You decide.
I am probably the exact person heebie is talking about here. I have been told that I write the way that I speak -- and the point is not about my natural, unaffected writing, but about my strained, over-formal speech. So when I say, "y'all" it's often taken ironically, or as a peculiar affectation.
My uncle has lived in Texas since the 70s. He can't say "y'all" without sounding like he's mocking southerners. His wife from Alabama does just fine, as do their kids. This is either support for heebie's theory or proof that my uncle is really good at mockery.
28: Great, now I have joke-regret. Thanx.
31: Aw, I bet you're lovably awkward for LOTS of reasons besides this one colloquialism.
The Raleigh-Durham area probably now contains as many non-southern accents as southern ones. In my many years of hearing people try awkwardly to adopt old regionalisms, "y'all" is usually the second one people pick up. First is "big ol'", as in "That's a big ol' [truck/dog/baby]." Hard to say which one sounds more strained, but oddly the one that *doesn't* sound off but totally should is condensing "I am going to" down to "I'm-a" (eg, I'm-a go to the store and grab some beer.)
I thought that was generational, not regional.
I can't bring myself to say "fixing to [verb]" either, let alone "fittina [verb]". But I am not sure that was a North Florida thing. It may be more Texan. It would just feel too rootedly uncosmopolitan.
Could be! I am both southern and old. "I'm-a run to the store" would have been a clearer example.
I've mostly seen it in a meme with SpongeBob rising from a chair.
37: I haven't noticed fittina in Gainesville, Heebie, for what that's worth. My 5-year-old has picked up some drawl and some y'all here, and internalized them enough to make fun of his Minnesota cousins for their own accents some.
"Big ol'" doesn't sound Southern to me at all, but I don't know if that's because of our nationalized media or because I heard it from my rural-ish white Northern elders.
SEE MOBY? Kymyz' kyd is proof that I grew up in the South!
I do in speech sometimes use "might could" and "might should" instead of "[could/should] probably".
I really encourage transplants to the South to stick with "may could" and "may should".
Myself, I may xouldn't worry about sounding pretentious.
In a video game I play with a somewhat affected and archaic diction, characters say "needs must" instead of "must" constantly. It's growing on me. We need more redundant double modals.
I needs must increase my bust
At my last job, I was on a two-person team with a woman who consistently dropped the infinitive "to be" in constructions like "This protocol needs checked." Then our group hired a third person, who like my other colleague was from rural-ish Pennsylvania, and she did the exact same thing. I wondered whether they thought everybody else sounded like they were adding unnecessary trill notes or something.
if your mother says "y'all", you can say "y'all". Otherwise, try "you all" on for size.
I feel like I've stumbled into a cultural appropriation tussle on Tumblr. Except less toxic.
Have we not had one or more 100-comment threads devoted to the mid-Atlantic "to be" elision?
48: As someone who was recently put on blast by grammar scolds in part for the redundancy of "off of," this perspective amuses me. "Why do you say 'to be'? We already know things are! It's redundant!" Because language is about maximizing information content per phoneme.
51: Can we have a(nother?) 100+ comment thread on what "mid-Atlantic" means?
I was on a two-person team with a woman who consistently dropped the infinitive "to be" in constructions like "This protocol needs checked."
It occurs to me that "drop" is one of those words that has opposite meanings. At first I thought Apo meant that "to be" was being inserted into constructions.
"Drop a beat" seems particularly problematic.
51: I do it!
I think it's funny to tell my students to drop something into the chat box over zoom, and then pretend that's my old-person slang. "Drop it in the chat! Drop it in the chat! Aren't I dope?"
48: Dropping the 'to be' is one of the few Pittsburghese trait that I have to worry about invading my speech. But now my kids are developing a Utah accent (think Sarah Palin, actually) and it's driving me a little crazy.
Anyway, yes, in my experience Southern accents (like accents most places) are highly class-linked - not that higher-class people don't have them, but usually much weaker and sometimes entirely nationalized. So consciously adopting them is both unnecessary and arouses suspicions of posing. But at the same time, people do pick stuff up.
62: The traditional upper-class southern accent (a la Foghorn Leghorn) is rapidly dying out, right? See also "Cultivated Australian."
The conscious y'all adopters have a tendency to exaggerate the drawl in a way that's inconsistent with the rest of their speech and it really does stick out.
"Conscious adopters" is hilarious, because it sounds like they're hoping it's more environmentally sustainable.
So, Pokey started dual language in 1st grade, Ace in kinder, and Rascal in PreK. (The program was being gradually rolled out.) Ace and Rascal automatically roll their rrs. Pokey can't, and it kills him.
The cutest thing is when they import Spanish things into their reading of English, like rolling their rrs when they sound out "arrow" or splitting "th" into a t and silent h, like saying "hwet-airr" for "weather".
Rascal wrote a story the other day, and spelled "hole" as "joel", which I also found adorable.
Head like a Joel, I'd rather die than give you control.
62: Politicians being the obvious outliers. They put on accents to sound like one of the guys, no matter what their class
I appropriate wildly. I'm a middle class middle age white guy raised up north but not only do I y'all but sometimes I like to mash an elevator button or put my groceries in a poke or carry my wife somewhere in the car or other things my neigbors say. I think I mostly throw them in for within-family interactions. It's not like I'm trying to pass for a rural southerner. It's not for everybody but y'all works so much better than the "you guys" I grew up with or especially "you all". I mean is it even "you all are going to need to turn in the assignment?" or is it "you are all going to need to turn in the assignment." And then you're stuck debating meaning in your head and the moment is delayed.
In conclusion I am annoying, just not on twitter.
The traditional upper-class southern accent (a la Foghorn Leghorn) is rapidly dying out, right?
I think so. Here's most of what I know about that. Lindsey Graham is mostly rhotic and his spates into non-rhotic seem to be gesturing at that older accent.
I mean is it even "you all are going to need to turn in the assignment?" or is it "you are all going to need to turn in the assignment." And then you're stuck debating meaning in your head and the moment is delayed.
I just close my eyes and deliver it to the groove, while making wavy motions with my fingers like I'm kneading invisible bread. They seem to get the gist of it.
75: A dilemma neatly solved by using "All y'all".
I guess, if you consider performance art to be a dilemma needs solved.
I use y'all and I ain't stoppin or readin the commies up there.
"Cultivated Australian"?? Would that be Sir Les Patterson?
The trick is knowing where to stick the little bit of sand in the Australian.
Now I'm not sure if I have the right name, what I mean is like Geoffrey Rush: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2xqjpEsC0s
Cant exactly place this one, but it's southern and I don't know how you could be classier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPOFM1AtV4w&t=36s
I use y'all and I ain't stoppin or readin the commies up there.
Commies is southern for commenters.
I say y'all from time to time, and I strongly doubt that my mom does. And I think your formulation on that is fundamentally flawed: my kids don't/didn't have German accents. One learns English usage, really, from peers more than from parents.
82: My god that facial hair. Silky, luxuriant, and terribly disturbing.
Thou hast a point, heebie. And it seems ye, or many of ye, agree with thee. I am ambivalent and so maybe not in total agreement with you.
My mother doesn't say y'all but I grew up farther south than she did, so I'm keeping it.
If your mother grew up calling everyone "cunt", can you sound natural saying it?
My grandmother used to call me a nix-nootz, whatever that is.
Uh, well that sheds a different light on things.
I know a couple of really serious cultivated Australian speakers, and they're both ballet teachers, both from Melbourne (it's in part a regional thing), and both intensely camp. (One of them is also an absolutely incorrigible ragehead arsehole.)
As someone who would never in a million years move to to humid, polite, flat, slow-talking south, I'm honestly just trying to give props for the thing I do like about the south.
The other one didn't apply himself.
One learns English usage, really, from peers more than from parents.
heebie is making a very Southern point about authenticity. You can become a Midwesterner or a Westerner or a coastal elite by moving. To be a Southerner, you have to be born in the South.
I mean, there are exceptions. You can become a white Southerner by moving, voting for Trump, and putting a Confederate flag decal on your pickup.
96 I may have started learning to talk when we moved to Texas, but at 16 months old, I probably didn't have a concept of singular and plural pronouns. On Montana standards, I'd never consider myself a native Texan -- and not by any other standard neither -- but I'll fight to the death, Alamo-style, for my right to say y'all.
My mom, on the other hand, does that wh thing with white, whether, and whale, and I don't talk like that.
The good news is that heebie has already lost this battle, because "y'all" is so easy and useful in this political moment, most of my spread-across-the-country coworkers use it.
The only useful slang I've picked up in the past decade is "yeet." The rest of it is boring.
How can I lose the battle of judging which people sound like dumbasses? It's like my superpower.
102 I bet my mom thinks that people who don't do the wh thing for whale sound like dumbasses, or at least that it's strong evidence of everything going to hell in a handbasket.
It's not that super a power.
Y'all is a word that moved north, though.
Like, the whole Great Migration was people from the south moving north, and they spoke a southern dialect and brought y'all with them. Y'all has established strongholds in urban centers across the north and midwest, and spread to suburban hinterlands from there.
I sometimes drop "to be," like "the dishes need washed." I didn't even realize anyone would perceive it as odd until a friend in college boggled at it once.
I guess "y'all" isn't unknown where I grew up, but I think "you all" was more common. My grandmother from eastern Tennessee said "you'uns," but nobody inherited it from her.
I say "y'all" sometimes, despite having only ever lived in California and the Northeast. Reprehensibly, I think I picked it up from a coworker who was constantly imitating Britney Spears or Jessica Simpson.
essear! Glad to see you. I read a headline saying that the whole Standard Model was overthrown by an experiment last week. Can you explain it all in five sentences or less, ideally including how this relates to the God Particle.
106: I find that construction so peculiar that I have a very specific recollection that the Emma Thompson character used it in Sense and Sensibility, but I have no idea where or in what context, or what specifically she said. I assumed it was some old-timey British thing. In fact, I think I am still assuming that. Is this really a mid-Atlantic thing? I've spent decades in the mid-Atlantic, and it seems unfamiliar to me.
It's not that super a power.
I have so few to choose from. It's either this, or my amazing ability to put anecdotal events in chronological order.
Anyway, a careful reading of the OP exonerates me from most of your defensive gripes, as I plainly said merely that transplants to the south generally sound like dumbasses when they say "y'all". If you all are saying it in far flung locations that are not here, why, you'd have to apply your local ear for dumbassery. I am not attuned to your local ways.
Furthermore, there is a disclaimer at the bottom that even with all that, I probably didn't mean you. Probably.
Thank you for coming to my Neb talk.
If I leave the Mid-Atlantic and travel at the speed of light for a year, I'll be a year older. But the Mid-Atlantic will be more than a year older because of science.
Now you'll all just have to wait another decade before I write a belligerently judgey post. See what you've done?
110: Well, I'm not from the mid-Atlantic, I'm from Louis/ville, but my dad's family is from the Virginia coast and I guess I might have gotten it from them. I thought it was in common use where I grew up, though.
109: It confirmed another experimental result from 15-20 years ago, so it's not entirely new or unexpected, but it definitely makes things interesting. I think there's a good chance that something will ultimately prove to be wrong with the "theoretical prediction" they compare to (which involves interpreting a lot of other experimental data, so it's not just theory). Although, some people are suggesting that in order for that to be true, something about the Standard Model has to broken somewhere else. I wouldn't bet on it turning out to be exciting, because nothing similar has so far. This is not the only place where there is currently a several-sigma anomaly in measurements involving muons, though, so who knows. Maybe we're getting the first glimpses of what will ultimately be a big picture that makes sense. Pretty confusing for now, though.
It's always more confusing than the headlines.
Honestly, stories about the social sciences are worse because of the headline is reporting something with an R^2 of like 0.02.
Is this really a mid-Atlantic thing? I've spent decades in the mid-Atlantic, and it seems unfamiliar to me.
It's primarily associated with western Pennsylvania. To the extent it's more widespread it would probably be in the Northern Appalachian region rather than Mid-Atlantic (and essear's testimony provides some support for this). Both regions are part of the larger Northern Midland dialect area but they're distinctive in various ways and also both have many localized dialects within them.
Western Pennsylvania also says "gum band" instead of "rubber band," which is just so fucked up.
54: Because every rose has its þ.
Also, 68 to 66.
89: Nichts nutz, loosely, "good-for-nothing," presumably said with some affection.
I can't recall ever having heard the 'needs washed' construction in the wild. I've been in western PA, a little, but even then only really talked to transplants (eg JRoth).
85 reminds me that I should get my beard (first time ever!) trimmed before going an a zoom this weekend.
110: See this map on acceptability. I'm pretty sure it's a Pittsburgh (or central PA, which sometimes follows Pittsburgh on accents, but that's probably changing) thing that spread west. I've definitely heard yinzers say it (along with the lovely positive anymore). Generally when people say "mid-Atlantic" to mean a US region they mean at least some of the (quasi-)coastal cities between New England and Richmond, but this doesn't really apply to them. It's an inland thing. No idea about its usage in British period accents, either on stage or authentically.
I've used "needs washed" and similar.
Meant to post that earlier. What teo said. I've found the application of "North Midland" east of Ohio to be not particularly helpful; the Pittsburgh accent region, Philly/Baltimore, New York/New Jersey, and a few others are so distinctive from typical North Midland that I don't see what's the point of even attempting to group them together. Maybe some particular isogloss that's seen as primary, but if so, why? Even if some North Midland features historically developed in Pittsburgh, many of them have been absent for decades, except due to a return via General American. I'm setting aside a few areas of eastern PA that aren't Appalachian, aren't Philadelphian, and don't have much if any Inland North influence (including the area I was raised in), but the Phonological Atlas doesn't have great info on them.
No part of Pennsylvania qualifies as "Mid-Atlantic." To be Mid-Atlantic, your state has to touch the Atlantic Ocean.
I've found the application of "North Midland" east of Ohio to be not particularly helpful; the Pittsburgh accent region, Philly/Baltimore, New York/New Jersey, and a few others are so distinctive from typical North Midland that I don't see what's the point of even attempting to group them together. Maybe some particular isogloss that's seen as primary, but if so, why?
I think it's more about shared history than any particular isogloss. The North Midland dialect area is indeed known for its considerable internal diversity, with each major city having its own distinctive dialect, which is in striking contrast especially to the much more homogeneous Inland North dialect area. They do all have a common origin in migration west from eastern Pennsylvania, however, with varying degrees of input from other migration routes (e.g., Virginia to the Ohio Valley via Kentucky). Another factor in the resulting diversity is the pattern of migration by individuals and small family groups, again in contrast to the transplantation of whole communities from New England to the Great Lakes. The source area around Philadelphia went on to have its own subsequent linguistic changes after the main period of migration, leading to further diversification within the overall area.
New York City is its own dialect area, btw, and is not usually considered part of North Midland, though it has some shared features. Unlike New England and Pennsylvania, it was not a major source area for western migration and its linguistic sphere of influence is quite small: adjacent parts of New Jersey, some distance up the Hudson Valley, and (surprisingly but quite strikingly) New Orleans.
Oldey-timey people in my area say "youse" instead of "y'all."
My parents and grandparents used to say "youse," and it sounded fine, it just made sense.
I cannot say it, though, because I've been educated above my station (well: above the expectations of my parents and grandparents, at any rate...), and it would just sound faux-folksy and inauthentic for me to say "youse."
The English language needs a better (more resonant) second-person plural than just "you," perhaps?
126: Okay, Cresapite.
127: Thanks, that's really helpful! My first thought was that if history and the pattern of settlement are the guiding reasons--which is consistent with, as you said, the Inland North--then we need to take into account that so much of Scots-Irish immigration to more southern parts of greater Appalachia did come in through Philly, yet that isn't part of the North Midland. It's clearly different, with much more influence from the Southern coastal regions even though it's distinct from them. But of course, it's literally called the South Midland. Duh. Thank you. And I'll have to look into New Orleans, I had no idea.
129: Have you considered the ancestral form "ye," still in use by some Irish and Newfies?
Spicy hot takes like we served 'em 10+ years ago! I got 'em!
"You all" should only be used as you would grammatically use it in normal English. Trying to sub it in for "y'all," which has a distinct usage, would sound:
a) Precisely like you don't want to dirty your tongue with peckerwood-speak, which is awkward b/c "y'all" happens to be a word that Peckerwoodese and AAVE have in common.
b) Like you're not *quite* saying "you people" but also not *not* saying it.
I'd like to make a case for: if you're not in the South, there is probably a regional rough-equivalent of "y'all" that you can use without feeling like you're trying to put on something foreign. Here on the Canadian Prairie it's "youse."
If you are in the South, then... I dunno, like, do you get lots of super-judgey lemon faces and people saying "bless your heart" when you don't say it with precisely the correct cadence? If that's happening, I could understand risking "you all," though again... not really the same. Otherwise, I'd just get my y'all on.
To be Mid-Atlantic, your state has to touch the Atlantic Ocean.
I'm pretty sure that's not quite right? Your state doesn't actually have to touch the Atlantic Ocean in order to qualify as a mid-Atlantic state. And PA totally makes the cut, despite its landlocked status...
(hahahah that last sentence sounds way more confident about the whole proposition than I'd actually feel)
96: "You not from 'round here, are ya?"
The English language needs a better (more resonant) second-person plural than just "you," perhaps?
May I suggest "you all"?
My dialect community is best represented by Rita Moreno ( https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K48I6ay4tbM ) in this regard.
OT: St. Vincent exploded. I didn't read the whole thing so I'm not sure if the singer or the island.
132 -- You have to remember that there are some, possibly even including the distinguished gentleman, who do not accept that that Philadelphia is legitimately in Pennsylvania, but know that royal officials were bribed to unfairly deprive Maryland of its rightful extent.
For those of us not partisans (eg everyone but spike and dalriata) the wikipedia entry on Cresap's war is quite informative.
Here's the arrest of Cresap (a Marylander)
Cresap continued his raids, destroying barns and livestock, until Sheriff Samuel Smith raised a posse of 24 armed "non-Quakers" to arrest him on November 25, 1736. Unable to get him to surrender, they set his cabin on fire, and when he made a run for the river, they were upon him before he could launch a boat. He shoved one of his captors overboard, and cried, "Cresap's getting away", and the other deputies pummeled their peer with oars until the ruse was discovered. Removed to Lancaster, a blacksmith was fetched to put him in steel manacles, but Cresap knocked the blacksmith down in one blow. Once constrained in steel, he was hauled off to Philadelphia, and paraded through the streets before being imprisoned. His spirit unbroken, he announced, "Damn it, this is one of the prettiest towns in Maryland!"
Spike's dream of Greater Maryland has a long and exceptionally fruitless history. Maryland has such an odd shape because it has lost every territorial dispute it's ever had.
111 IIR the archives C isn't your super power the ability to pinch a perfectly clean loaf?
62: there used to be distinct regional "upper class" accents, and those have mostly disappeared.
This is interesting to me. I have been forced to to adopt specific British phrases and words - literally had customers pretending to not understand me when I said aluminium and that sort of thing; and my coworkers pounce on me for any Americanisms constantly (still!). (My husband only (jokingly) objected to 'erbal and I gave that up easily.) I do draw the line at some things (I will not say zed unless I am really worried about being understood and I refuse the British pronunciation of vase). But my speech is now so littered with Britishicisms that when I speak to Americans, they say I sound British - the Brits will most definitely disagree there, though my accent is getting strange with specific vowels.
I would almost rather have stuck to my 'native' phrasings (I mean, really, what self-respecting American ever said I'm just popping to the shop?) but I felt ... bullied is too strong, but definitely an element of that ... to drop what I would normally say and adopt their patterns. Is that going on with transplants to the South with y'all, or do you NOT want the carpet baggers to adapt?
(I should probably confess here that I say y'all; my mother doesn't but my father did; and I don't think Southern California fits in the traditional y'all catchment area...)
115: I read the news and immediately went to your FB page to see if perhaps you had said something about it in a way that would be comprehensible to me, so thank you very much!
142: Most embarrassingly, they lost The Wedge. Pennsylvania did, too, but it clearly shouldn't be part of PA except to the extent that all of Delaware should be part of PA. (As has been noted on Twitter, this is only one world leader originally from the Lower Counties.)
145: I've found that I reflexively increase my Americanisms when I talk to Brits, as a soft of defense of not being able to play the Englishness game. The one exception being those automated phone menu systems, where a fake British accent seems to help. I think I'm more oblivious than you and I live in a more cosmopolitan area--at least for now I'm as likely to talk to a continental migrant as a native--so there's probably more acceptance of difference, but when there isn't I don't notice it.
'erbal to herbal was a very easy transition, I think because I didn't learn the correct American pronunciation until years after I had first read it. One of those weird situations where the Americanism sounds more British than the British: because we have something to prove, we adopt or retain French or Latinate pronunciations that the British upper class don't, either because they're confident in their cultural superiority or they want to distinguish themselves from the French.
A lot of SoCal is plausible y'all country since there was tons of migration from the South to the Central Valley and greater Los Angeles. I've heard that the stereotypical Valley Girl accent contains some Southernisms that can be traced back to Dustbowl migrants.
Essear: I was also hoping you'd come here to explain this, so thank you!
147.1: In the decade or so that I've lived here, adopting some of the local chauvinism/state pride has been highly enjoyable, primarily because there's no good reason for it to exist other than our singular contribution to women's basketball (and, I guess, the presidency). Mr. Robot still really can't stand the state, but does very much appreciate it being within easy driving distance of so many other cool places. That justification hasn't been working as well during the pandemic. I'm less picky than he is, and think the state is basically fine, just too full of strip malls. The extent to which it's a very small world sometimes surprises me, but I just assume that everyone knows each other from second grade, or dating someone's brother, or attending beauty school together, and that works quite well.
I said y'all through high school and college, and largely stopped some time in grad school. I do not love that I picked up some of the Midwestern "o" in that period, still reinforced by Mr. Robot and my in-laws. I have a very sympathetic accent, which probably sounds try-hard or inauthentic to people but really means that I'm just suggestible.
The biggest thing I've tried (and struggled with) dropping from my vocabulary has been using "guys" in addressing my students generically (e.g., "Listen, guys."). Replacements thus far have included: folks, people, gang, and in rare desperate cases, y'all.
Rehoboth was nice enough, but it's basically Maryland.
It's easy to lose track of what people know about each other, who came when and all that, but telling () about the history of, well anything, might end up being something like that twitter idiot who once told David Simon he should watch the Wire if he really wanted to know what life in Baltimore is like.
You can take a boat from Delaware to New Jersey. It's kind of interesting, but then you have to drive in New Jersey and the stories are true.
Is Wilmington just a suburb of Philadelphia?
148: Delaware sucks (excepting some pretty wetlands and beaches), but honestly most states don't have a sensible reason to exist. My home state doesn't make any sense as an entity, either.
150: I'm not good at not being That Guy, so noted. Sorry, Parenthetical.
151: You can walk from Delaware to New Jersey without taking a bridge.
But not near Rehoboth.
Also, the Chesapeake Bay should really be called the Susquehanna Bay, because it is really an estuary of the Susquehanna River.
I heard that from an oysterman who was giving tours during the part of the year where the months don't have an 'r' in them. Except it was October, so there's obviously another problem with oystering in the fall that I forgot.
141. Nice to see so many fellow Maryland Irredentists. Have you all done your required-by-law read of The Sot-weed Factor and Mason & Dixon?
There will be a quiz.
I think we have a copy of Mason & Dixon on the shelf here. I've never read it.
I'd prefer any form of "y'all" to the "you people" that clients often come out with. Apparently other people don't find this as offensive as I do, but I just don't see how you can interpret it except as an expression of belligerence.
I associate "you people" with H Ross Perot's ill-advised attempt to reach out to the African-African community.
I remember this especially well because of my ill-advised attempt at wit -- we were talking about the Presidential election and an African-American coworker said she definitely wasn't voting for Perot. "Oh, yeah," I quipped, "You people don't like him.". She wasn't amused.
OT: My son is listening so some D&D-related song that is using Boney M music. The internet is weird.
154. Are you referring to the fact that the upper Delaware Bay belongs to Delaware? The boundary (until you get further south) is the New Jersey shoreline as of 17-something, and the shoreline has changed since then, so there are little outcroppings of Delaware attached to "mainland" New Jersey. (Eventually the boundary becomes the middle of the bay.) The southern boundary of Maryland is the Virginia shoreline of the Potomac River most of the way down; then it takes a jog across the bay to pick up the VA part of the Delmarva Peninsula. Many decades ago Maryland entrepreneurs built slot parlors on the Potomac, just offshore of Virginia: the southern counties of MD had legal slots, and Virginians could just walk out the dock to the slot parlor. That went away around the time of Spiro T. Agnew, patron saint of graft.
The boundaries of the mid-Atlantic states are pretty weird (see Mason & Dixon, op. cit.).
147: I suspect it's really different when you're married to a Brit and here for settlement rather than coming over for work; on top of that, being in a customer service position for part of that time probably shaped a lot of my interactions. I have never ever had someone point out my Americanness when interacting randomly, and it is always good-natured. While I am in the sticks, this area is fairly diverse. I should also point out that I cannot do a fake accent of any sort, whatsoever, so that might also be part of the fun for them. (Also, upon reflection, I am extraordinarily sensitive to any sort of correction and am fairly socially anxious so I may just be hyper attuned.)
A lot of SoCal is plausible y'all country since there was tons of migration from the South to the Central Valley and greater Los Angeles. I've heard that the stereotypical Valley Girl accent contains some Southernisms that can be traced back to Dustbowl migrants.
I definitely didn't hear much in the way of y'all growing up, possibly because I grew up 150 miles north of LA. My peer group was largely like me, with parents who arrived in CA in the 70s from all over the US & Mexico (my own father is from rural Tennessee via Kansas via the navy). Though I definitely have a lot of the Valley Girl intonations, I never really had the slang - probably we were too rural for that.
but telling () about the history of, well anything, might end up being something like that twitter idiot who once told David Simon he should watch the Wire if he really wanted to know what life in Baltimore is like.
That Twitter exchange was so amazing. You're being far too kind to me, as while I do know Californian history fairly well, I definitely have so much to continue to learn. And I don't know much about linguistics at all (my brain freezes up like it does when I read about physics).
150: I'm not good at not being That Guy, so noted. Sorry, Parenthetical.
Thank you and no worries!
160 -- while tracing DNA matches, I found that I'm distantly related to the Perots of Texas. One of the early Perreaults of Louisiana had several children with a free woman of color -- mostly before the Louisiana Purchase, iirc -- and so for generations there were white Perots (Ross' ancestry) and 'mulatto' Perots. Late in the 19th century, several of the latter folks moved to Arkansas and became white, and from there descendants fanned out all over the west. Some of 'you people' are 'his people.'
I'm still boggled that such people are identifiably related to me.
Sorry to tell this story again. You people made me do it.
Paren, probably VSOOBC, but you have an utterly mystifying accent at this point! It's absolutely fascinating as a hybrid. Your description is entirely accurate but defies (my) imagination. I can't imagine trying to shift my accent in the way you have.
When I TAed in Texas, I got lots of flack for addressing the class as "you guys" so adopted "y'all." Unfortunately, y'all was singular in Texas so no one thought I was speaking to them. Eventually, I was able to encourage students to assemble to view demonstrations by summoning "all y'all." I am the least y'all-accented person ever but use it sometimes when I want to combine polite condescension with a second person plural.
VSOOBC
That's very expensive brandy?
This has nothing to do with anything, but I went for a walk tonight and I saw a fox that was literally trotting. It had, I think, a groundhog in its mouth and was walking along the sidewalk with obvious joy in its eyes. It jumped up onto a little wall, walked along the wall for a bit, and then went to other side of the wall.
Anyway, it looked too big to be a squirrel. I guess it could have been a raccoon, but I don't think foxes eat many raccoons. Maybe a possum, but I did not see any bare tail.
I had a husky that liked to bill baby raccoons. A groundhog is pretty big for a fox.
And then kill them when they didn't pay up.
It was a pretty big fox. I thought it was a coyote when I first saw it.
Are you referring to the fact that the upper Delaware Bay belongs to Delaware?
Those of us who don't recognize the Theft of 1683 understand that the upper Delaware Bay actually belongs to Maryland because it is below the 40th parallel.
And actually they should call it the upper Maryland Bay.
172. Orthodox Maryland Irredentism. /agree
NE Ohio native who spent 5 of 8 years in Houston late 70 s to early 80s. I semi-consciously never adopted y'all. Was not something I needed to think about much, but I did witness several Northern transplant co-workers make the semi-awkward transition to y'all. I find the pen-pin merger to be almost more diagnostic than y'all--and I think it has further "natural" extent.
As mentioned by several, all of this glosses over many sub-regional dialects, particular the inland vs. lowland South* (which can also be a class line in some areas). It's been several years since I visited this crazy but very interesting and useful page (map trying to show way too many linguistic variations in US and Canada with lots and lots of annotations.) Although many of the links are dead, has a catalog of nearly 1000 samples of speech from around the countries.
Included is a section on the "Unique Position of Nebraska" which he describes a the "linguistic center of North America."
*A Friend from near Mobile AL is my exemplar for this. Unique (and soft) intonation even after MIT, Sandford and 30+ years in Pittsburgh.
164: I believe I have posted this before but one of my favorite brand names was "Hep Ur Sef" gasoline found in and around Texarkana. I always pictured Ross Perot saying it
My dad is was raised at a point in between Gibbon and Grand Island. Our ancestors founded a town there.
My main linguistic oddity is saying "sang-witch" instead of "sandwich".
This gets me thinking about a call I made last week to a guy in Lincoln. He sounded exactly like my cousin who was born, raised, and lived most of his life in the small zone between Gibbon and Grand Island. I also asked him where he was from, but decided that was kind of a person question.
"Broken Bow" is an interesting place name. It was originally "Broken Arrow," but in the 1890s, people decided that was too direct of a reference to incident after which the town was named (a man on the Oregon Trail got kicked in the crotch by an ox and never was able to get an erection again).
Gibbon was named after the local primate population, which was unfortunately hunted to extinction at the same time as the buffalo nearly suffered the same fate.
St. Paul was named after a tent maker from Tarsus who used to be called "Saul".
And "Grand Island" was named after a really shitty island that isn't even there now because the Platte River is a bitch.
Kearney got its name because of General Kearny and shitty spelling.
St. Paul is best known as the home of Dorothy Lynch salad dressing, because some people don't find Russian dressing sweet enough.
"Dorothy Lynch" was named for the command the Wicked Witch of the West gave to her flying monkeys.
180 I wouldn't have been fooled by that even if I didn't live near Gibbons Pass, which is how Gibbon got to the Big Hole where the Nimiipuu kicked his ass. Standing up to Pickett's Charge is reason enough to name places after him, I guess.
Most of the other ones were true.
OT: I've been trying Bonobos clothes, but I just now noticed that a shirt with an 18" neck is in their fat man sizes. That seems unfair.
Paren, probably VSOOBC, but you have an utterly mystifying accent at this point! It's absolutely fascinating as a hybrid. Your description is entirely accurate but defies (my) imagination. I can't imagine trying to shift my accent in the way you have.
It is getting EVEN WORSE. Like, I probably underplay the amount that my vowel pronunciations have changed. I say things and it's just like - where did that come from? And it's utterly unconscious beyond remembering to say holiday instead of vacation and that sort of thing. I know when i pick up the phone I do sound utterly British for a good 30 seconds. But I can't maintain it, and I cannot do it on purpose to save my life. I'm glad to have this independently verified though, no matter the sanctity of off-blog communications!
In regard to 174, I remained a laughable Yank in speech to everyone in Houston, but my mother was vaguely dismayed that she detected a faint southern accent. And sure, I am quite lazy in my speech and some of those inflections and word choices probably crept in.
With regard to living in Pittsburgh and "needs (to be) cleaned" et al, I very occasionally slip to the horror of my daughter-of-an-NYC-English-teacher wife. Most of our children's teachers did it the yinzer way, and I will say that at my workplace it was pretty universal for anyone born locally. I have at times attempted to argue the "Omit needless words!" position on "to be" and am not really sure that I understand the nuances of dal's 52.
1) The house needs to be cleaned,
2) The house needs cleaned.
3) The house needs cleaning.
4) The house needs a cleaning.
Discuss.
The availability of 3 is what makes 2, which is incorrect in most places English is spoken, incomprehensible.
But putting french fries inside the sandwich earns a lot of points, and so I won't say Pittburghish needs corrected.
The house is fine. In Europe it's considered sophisticated to have the living room full of boxes from when your basement was flooding.
I remember people in Michigan saying "doorwall" for sliding glass door. Weirdos.
190: I am curious as to whether there was a time when 3 was considered incorrect--a sloppy shortcut for 4.
193: Do they use the same word for a non-glass panel door?
193: What? The in-laws all call them "sliders." I feel like "doorwall" would be memorably weird.
Oh, huh, AJ says he has heard it before (he grew up here but says he thinks he heard it elsewhere). Apparently, it comes from a brand name of sliding glass doors manufactured in a Detroit suburb that became a general term, like Kleenex or Xerox.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=doorwall&=true&defid=6164294
Did the Sphinx used to be called Sphina/Sphino but now we're all PC?
162: Right, all I meant is that because of the river shifting there are small bits of the left bank that belong to Delaware. (Even with these, New Jersey is the most peninsular state.) Not uncommon across the US, as Moby has mentioned with regard to the Omaha airport. I'm surprised we've made it this far and no one has mentioned the one circular state border.
163: You're very kind! You're right, I wasn't taking into account how different it'd be to marry a particular Brit, and marry into a particular community. When I feel like I can try to make friends again I'll have a lot more freedom to community-shop. We do intend to be here for a while, but not necessarily forever. So who knows. (And yes, for me too, a lot of this is social anxiety and sensitivity to correction, but in my case I also have low social intelligence, so since I often can't tell what the meta-conversation is, I over-imagine corrections, so sometimes I actively try to be oblivious. Also why my posting here correlates with me being in mental states that are least conducive to good posting. Not good coping strategies, obviously, and leads to negative externalities.)
Wondering if maybe I should make some recordings so I can measure change over the years, especially with regard to vowels.
190: I was being silly. As I said I've recently been exposed to grammar scolds denigrating a form I use* in part because it's redundant. Of course, that isn't what's really happening: they were bothered because I used a low status form. The efficiency of a statement is orthogonal to its status level. There will be times where the high status form has more words than the low status form, and vice versa. I was amusing myself by considering a person with a low status dialect that has a more efficient form complaining about the inefficiency of the high status dialect. Which probably happens all the time.
Redundancy isn't inherently bad. It works like a parity bit, making it more likely speech will be understood through a lossy medium. Increasing efficiency competes against other needs like prosody and the difficulty in encoding/decoding the idea grammatically.
* Specifically, "build off of" is part of my idiom. I didn't realize it and "build off" are highly deprecated. I think I can make a defense of them, but whatever.
I would like to register a complaint against "bake off" when used to mean "finish cooking by baking in the oven." I'm not sure about the grammar, but it sounds wrong to me.
re: 201
What did the grammar scold think was the "correct" form? I would also sometimes use "build off of" in certain specific contexts, although I'd be perfectly happy to use, and probably do use, "build upon".
I can't really remember being grammar scolded very often. I'd hand them a new orifice if they did, though. The only time I can remember it happening in earnest was the word "outwith", which is a perfectly acceptable word in formal Scottish English, but is not in English English.
203: "Build on." I gather "build upon" is also acceptable/traditional, but maybe a bit more stuffy and old-fashioned. A Google Ngrams search shows that in print, "build off" has been growing by orders of magnitude over the last forty years, but it's usage almost infinitesimally small compared to "build on." But that's in edited printed works. Google Trends gives a 8:1 ratio of "build on" to "build off," but I doubt the set of people who search for these is very instructive (except to the extent that they're searching to find out what the right way to say it is).
I got a few responses of the form "when I teach my students, I draw a diagram to show you're building ON [top of] something," but an existence proof doesn't show other interpretations as invalid. "off of" describes a dynamic process, "on" a static state. "off of" is clearly no more redundant than "onto," it just resists being turned into a single word because "offof" isn't pleasing.
I am very conscious of dialect, as someone who grew up using a huge amount of Scots vocabulary and grammar,* and who grew up with quite a working class accent, I am quite conscious of code-switching. I feel inauthentic using Scots words a lot of the time, even though I grew up using them, because I don't live in Scotland any more, and it feels increasingly fake to turn them on and off. In fact, it's quite hard to turn them on and off. While code-switching in terms of social class, is something I can do quite deliberately, code-switching in terms of dialect is prompted by who I am speaking to. It feels like I'm faking it if I try to speak that way to a non-Scots-speaker.
* although ironically, because my Dad is Glaswegian, and Glasgow doesn't have a lot of Scots vocabulary in the local dialect,** I didn't start using a lot of those words until I'd been at school for a few years.
** contrary to popular belief outside Scotland
re: 204
I would never ever say "build off" without the second "of" on the end. "I think we'll build off this code-base" sounds literally ungrammatical to me, in my idiolect. "Build upon" or "Build off of" are the two choices (for me, not judging the wrongly wrong wrong people who use "build off" simpliciter). Build on is also ok, as in it doesn't seem _wrong_ in my idiolect, but I wouldn't naturally choose it, in most contexts, I don't think.
In Scots, it'd be "offae" (not sure what the format orthography for that would be, and not to be confused with "awfy").
** contrary to popular belief outside Scotland
This is a surprise to me (but if we talked about it before, apologies for forgetting). Curious as to how that ended up--a relatively late transfer to Scots from Gaelic in the west? More influence from e.g. Irish migrants than Edinburgh or the Northeast? Wikipedia is not helpful here since it relates the Glasgow patter to West Central Scots.
"Build off" feels clipped and very informal to me, but not wrong. "Build on" sounds fine and I might use it, but rarely. I only searched for it because of how Ngrams searches for strings. "offae" looks nice.
Oh, crud, the original discussion wasn't "built," it was "based on" versus "based off of" and "based off." Sorry if that changes things. I had been thinking of other verbs, trying to determine where my boundaries of acceptability were. And this also makes clear how loose these conceptual differences are in my head.
Searching for it here shows that yes, I use "based off of" but am not alone. It also brings up a comment at LGM about changes in acceptability.
I would have guessed that everywhere in the central belt had less distinctive vocabulary than Doric or Shetland, but I wouldn't have known at all how to guess within the central belt. Is the point here that dialect leveling happens faster in cities so you get less Scots vocabulary in both Glasgow and Edinburgh than the rest of non-traditionally-Gaelic Scotland, or is there also less Scots in Glasgow than Edinburgh?
(I don't find it easy to tell whether I've failed to understand something due to accent or distinctive vocabulary, so I'm utterly useless at being able to tell this myself. It's easy for me to say where I struggle to understand working class people more, and Glasgow is more difficult than Edinburgh, which is in turn more difficult than Ullapool, but I have literally no idea how much of that is vocabulary versus accent.)
re: 208
Ah, in my idiolect, "based on", "based off of" and "based upon" are all fine. I'd never use "based off" without the "of" but it seems less (and this is probably a personal idiosyncrasy) wrong than "build off".
re: 207
Basically all of those, I think. If you think of Scots as basically running across the country in a diagonal line not wildly far off the line of the great highland fault line, with strong Scots in Stirlingshire, Fife, Perthshire, bits of the Lothians and up into the North East, and none at all on the North West, with Glasgow sort of at the point where the two halves meet, that'd be about right. It's not that there's no use of Scots but it's much less than in the east.
less Scots in Glasgow than Edinburgh
Yes, that would be true. Your general point about the central belt is also probably true, I'm from a quasi-rural area on the edge of a large industrial town in the central belt, and the dialect there probably sits a bit closer to to standard English on a spectrum than, say, in rural Fife, or in Aberdeenshire. But it's still much more dialect-heavy than on the west coast (or Edinburgh, I suspect).
I wonder if there's a countervailing effect where Edinburgh's high tourism rates means that there's more code-switching there? Like maybe a Glasgow cabbie uses as much Scots vocabulary as an Edinburgh cabbie when they have a tourist in the cab, but the latter uses more Scots vocab at home?
re: 212
Having lived in Glasgow for quite a few years, and having one entire side of my family from there, I'm just pretty sure that most Glaswegians use much less Scots vocabulary and grammar than people from the East and especially the North East do in most situations. That said, I'm sure there's a lot of variation. Fwiw, the only time I, personally, have ever encountered people whose dialect speech I couldn't fully and immediately understand they were Doric speakers.
You can because of the less elaborate tops.
189.2: I wonder if working in retail makes this process faster? Since you've developed speech patterns in your job-specific routine.
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I tell you, the mood around here is *not* improving. Talk about a long hot summer, depending on what happens with Chauvin, if there's one more police killing in the cities, things could really pop off. Who knows, this current situation could boil over, although it is kind of chilly and the security forces are clamping down at 7 pm. (Yes, that's right, three counties under curfew because the goddamn pigs can keep from killing Black people.) But I expect there will be some pretty big marches around the Wright murder this weekend, so who knows?
I just watched Downfall to cheer myself up with some dead Nazis.
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I used to read the outcomes of the various post-WWII trials for that. Wikipedia has lots of detail.