“Now how many of y’all think BoBo gonna try to convince us that polls don’t matter… of course unless they are trash for Biden & great for Trump!”
Who speaks like this?
Nah, we’re taking y’all back as a gender neutral replacement for “you guys”
I use it in a professional setting now even.
Strangely, it keeps everyone happy, no one has ever object to y’all and it’s grammatically perfect.
It’s actually a significant flaw in English that there’s no generally accepted 2nd person plural pronoun. There’s probably another language in the same boat but I’m not aware of one personally.
Currently in the running are:
- Y’all (favored in the south)
- Yous (favored in the north, particularly the northeast)
- And the somewhat awkward “you all”, the only one that’s officially correct
For anyone who speaks a language other than English the missing pronoun is a pretty glaring thing.
My wife and I have been learning more German and it has ‘euch’ which is analogous to y’all. It took me a while to get that one worked out because it’s baked into the language instead of being a kind of slang hack for what English is missing.
Then there’s this… Used to live in Florence so Y’all is pretty normal around there
There’s also “you guys” if you use “guys” as gender-neutral, since there’s no particularly good feminine version of “guys”. There’s just “gals”, which sounds incredibly old fashioned, or “girls”, which sounds totally condescending when talking about adult women, or maybe “ladies”.
Ireland uses ‘ye’. There are multiple Hibernian English phrases or words that are just direct translations from Irish, which has second person plural, although the grammatical structure is different.
In Dublin, they often use ‘youse’, but it’s more slang than accepted. Ye is still seen as not entirely correct but is commonplace enough in everyday speech to be more than slang.
English is a terrible language, and I say that as a native speaker.
It’s a language from an isolated island that only the lower class spoke for centuries. For generations English royalty didn’t even speak English.
So the commoners just did whatever they wanted with it.
It why we use English words for livestock, but when someone eats it, we use French.
The people who could speak English were the ones raising the animals, not eating them.
It why we use English words for livestock, but when someone eats it, we use French.
The people who could speak English were the ones raising the animals, not eating them.
This is amusing but I’m not sure it’s accurate. Even in French (or other Latin languages) the words differ.
Vache = Boeuf
Cochon = Porc
Poule = Poulet (as in English, chicken is the same)
I see some stickers sometimes that says “Ya’ll means you all” and I love it.
come on, the Scottish/north english “yous” is better than Y’all, and yous cant deny it!
