the phrase “yall” melting my brain cells painfully, 1 cell at a time:
It’s why I like bacteria. Being from Wyoming, it’s the only culture some of my hick kin have.
If you use it without the strong drawl it’ll blend in perfectly fine. I’m willing to bet that the reason you don’t think it’s sounds nice is cause your brain hears the world then your brain hears in Squidbillies rather than just another Americanism of dropping syllables. That internal shift in your brain can cause dissonance and make it sound ugly.
I’ve worked hard to get rid of my southern accent but to me, “you all” just feels forced and clunky. Kind of like when someone uses an unnecessary vocabulary word when it doesn’t add any extra meaning.
There are many different accents for the word. My second favorite is the Georgia Peach / Antebellum. I don’t know the term for my top favorite but I’ll dub it “the highly educated and eloquent college professor who grew up in a swamp”, it’s like brown sugar for my ears
It’s a second person plural pronoun. Other languages have them. For instance, Spanish has vosotros/ustedes and German has ihr.
English already has a plural pronoun: “you”. It’s the singular that we’ve lost: “thou”.
The nice thing about languages is that they evolve, change, reconfigure, and adapt. They are not sacred things, but tools we use and manipulate. While we may have something similar, the utility needs of our words change over time and over regions. In certain parts of the United States and elsewhere ‘y’all’ has filed in the linguistic gap.
yeah, I know the utility of the word but it just doesn’t sound nice, I try to restructure my sentences to avoid it whenever possible. just the tone of “yall” has the “trying to seem cool” vibe and it feels like an overfriendly word to use in most scenarios.
Yet the misuse of a colon as a form of sentence punctuation doesn’t hurt more? Talk about arbitrary…
