Unsuitable for all y'all
I was reminded this morning of one of my favorite phrases in the Southern US English language, when my friend Alex emailed a group of this site's readers and said:
"Fuck all y'all. But in a good way."
Let's start with the best word in there: y'all. It's a fantastic word. It's not only fun to say, but it's something that gives me pride in being Southern not only when I use it, but when I get made fun of for using it. And there's no good substitute for it. "You" is confusing when addressing a bunch of people, and "you guys" is wrong unless you're addressing only men.
Combined with "all", it becomes one of the greatest phrases of all time. It's redundancy ("all of you all") adds a kind of power that I can't think an equal of. Try this sometime: put your arm into a slow sweeping motion while saying, "allllllllll y'all" and try and tell me there's any better way to say that every single one of you gets what I'm giving and there are NO exceptions.
And then combined with "fuck"...it's just a great phrase. I mean, what are you going to say back to that? Three little words...so much power.
So I say to you, Are Seven readers: fuck all y'all, in the nicest possible way.
8 comments:
yeah, it's good stuff. Really, if you think about it, southerners should really be thanked for coming up with "y'all". Because the freakin' stupid English language lacks a good pronoun for the second person plural - I mean "You"? How lazy is that? Yup, it took southerners to refine the language and come up with "y'all" - which simply glides off the tongue, unlike "youse guys" - which is not so elegant, yet, admittadly, adorable in it's own respect.
The possessive form is also fun:
"I've got all y'all's comments right here," said the blogger.
YES!
The Dutch word is "jullie" pronounced like "you-lee." In a way, it's close to ya'll. In fact, I think you might be able to trace all bad American grammar to the Dutch influence on our culture. In particular, all the incorrect forms of the past tense of 'to be' that you hear in the States -- "You was a bad boy," for instance. In Dutch, it'd be correct. U was niet goed.
I also really like fixin' as in "I'm fixin' to go make dinner." I used to say that a lot more until I actually got sick of people making fun of me.
I vote for bringing back ye, as in "Fuck all of ye" or more popularly, "Avast ye scurvy dogs."
Another great thing about "y'all" is that it's much easier to rhyme than "yous guys." There would be a lot fewer country music and rap songs without the word "y'all."
Plus, when you're drunk you can say "y'all" without anyone noticing if you're slurring your words.
this comment is one of those two-fers: covering 2 topics at once.
I watched "walk the line" today and of course, i had godfather netflix reid's comments in my mind for the ring of fire writing scene...
About an hour into the movie, my sister and i decided to put the english subtitles on. I was just plain tired of rewinding to try to understand what the hell he was saying. (i'm getting to the point) so there comes a scene near the end, where june says what you and I know is "y'all", but the subtitler decides to write "ya'll".
so, ignoring the obvious typo possibility, what do you think this stands for?
It stands for "ya will".
Actually, that was something that I wanted to go into on this post and didn't have time for: the fact that, while most of the grammar-loving world will tell you that "y'all" is grammatically incorrect, I'll argue on the correct punctuation of it. Anyone who writes it as "ya'll" is just wrong. Just...so wrong.
Funny, I almost wrote the same thing in my earlier post. I was going to say you can always point out the northerners because they mispell it "ya'll".
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