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Around these parts we have plenty of kills
Any other weird local slang from YOUR area ?
Any other weird local slang from YOUR area ?
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The plural of you is you'uns -
I never heard you'uns growing up, it was always y'all. But moving to a very rural part of southern middle Tennessee informed me pretty quick. Most people living here had grandparents and even parents who didn't have running water. My wife had some really old relatives who kept their butter, eggs, and milk in a small cave where their spring water came from because they didn't have electricity in the mid eighties!! Does that blow your mind? It certainly did mine. One of my colleagues can remember the phone company wiring his house up for the first time for phone service in the late seventies. So you'uns (pronounced yuns) doesn't surprise me so much anymore.Comment
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The proper (original Southern) spelling is ya'll.Comment
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Actually, it's y'all, as in "you all".
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Nope. It's a contraction of the Southern phrase "ya all." This was *******ized before the Civil War by Northern newspapers and deliberately misspelled with the intent of removing the Southerness of the common Southern term. No true Southerner would ever use the phrase "you all" -- that is a Northern phrase.Comment
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Wow... the auto-censorship filter of this site is really strict, and won't even let me use harmless common English words! Keeping my vocabulary skills honed, I guess...Comment
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Was that your evidence? Wikipedia? Was there a single reference cited on that publicly-edited page that was more than 20 years old? According to Wikipedia, Donald Rumsfeld is an "alien lizard who eats human babies," so I think I will rely on my etymology texts and historical resources when it comes to etymology and history. I don't have the definitive history on the origin of the word on hand right now, and I have no interest in debating this here. Ya'll have a good time spelling it any way ya'll want, it really makes no difference to me.Comment
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Didn't mean to upset you there, Sentient! I'm just telling you how we in South Carolina spell it (and apparently in Florence, KY).Comment
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Florence, Kentucky? You mean the northernmost point in the state? To be clear, they originally spelled the word "MALL," but only changed it for legal reasons. Virtually ALL my family is from farther south than that, my South Carolina roots go back to the 1700s.
You didn't upset me -- I thought I made it clear that I really don't care how ya'll want to spell it. How Florence, KY repaints their water tower in the mid 1970s has perhaps nothing to do with how Southerners spoke and wrote in the 1800s.
The earliest documented useage of the word "Ya'll" was in antebellum Southern newspapers; it was Northern newspapers who changed it to the "y'all" spelling you cite so, no -- that is NOT how South Carolinians always spelled it; they have over time adopted the Northern spelling of the word. I took only a cursory look at your Wikipedia page, but I didn't see any historical references cited, please correct me if I am wrong on that.
We're done here. I am certain I am not going to convince you and -- I need to make this very clear -- I really don't care. Believe me or don't, but facts are facts and the final word in this discussion is rooted in history and readily-available literature. I don't need to prove my point.Comment
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Around here they don't say "needs to be." Rather, "It needs fixed." or "It needs washed."Comment
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