Rotundlr

Y’all, youall, all y’all.

naamahdarling:

therotund:

Merf. Thinking is Hard.: cabell: tranqualizer: cobracunt: tripledrycap: epithimia:…

cabell:

tranqualizer:

cobracunt:

tripledrycap:

epithimia:

con-air-bunny:

When someone types Y’all I can no longer take them seriously ever again.

shit, that means you stopped taking me serious like eons ago :c

When your entire perception of someone is based on the dialect they speak with, I can no longer take you seriously.

*sunglasses, drives away into the sun*

Y’all is totally a valid word (a proper contraction of you and all) that serves the important purpose of being a second person plural pronoun. Though I have used it in a singular fashion.

My accent mostly only comes out when I am drunk, though I have heard from other people that I always have a slight one. I have very specific memories of going to school in a wealthy ATL school district full of transplanted northerners - those kids wanted me to say certain words on command so they could hear the difference in the way we talked.

Basically, fuck a bunch of y’all if you’re discounting folks based on accent and/or dialect. That shit might have worked to make me ashamed in the 5th damn grade but I am grown now and will use ”y’all” as much as I please.

I grew up being taught in school that I should say “at” and not “et”, “going down to the corner store” instead of “goin’ down to the corner store” or “go-on down to the corner store”, “isn’t” instead of “ain’t”, “no” or “nah” instead of “naw.”  As far as navigating communication within a wider cultural context, such lessons were helpful.  I now know how to speak “correctly,” which is useful when dealing with people who care whether or not I do.  What was not useful was the heaping helping of classism I was treated to while I was being taught.

I was born, raised, and remain in Oklahoma, and I have never had a strong accent.  My father spoke Californian-style English and my mother was, while slightly more accented due to an upbringing in Texas/Louisiana/Oklahoma, still not what I would call a dialectical speaker by the time I was born.  They didn’t criticize how I spoke, they just modeled “correct” speech, and I still felt obligated to extinguish whatever remained of my accent.  As a result, I don’t have much of an accent.  (I was once identified, in Victoria, B.C., as an Oklahoman by another native Oklahoman within thirty seconds, so make of that what you will.  My sister, who sounds exactly like I do, was considered to sound Southern while in New York.)

At any rate, I can navigate formal English, both spoken and written, about as well as anyone who was not raised being beaten with rulers for every minor infraction.  I break the rules, I am sure, but I break fewer than most others.  Yet, I have voluntarily chosen to use “y’all”; a word I don’t think I used at all when I was younger because its fell magical power might have caused the wheels to fall off our Pinto, our refrigerator to teleport onto the front porch, all our teeth to fall out, and our clothes turn to dirty overalls.  It might also have turned us a different color.  You know.  Like those people.  (Classism and racism, like the peanut butter and chocolate of assholery.)

I’ve chosen to use it because it is a great fucking word.

“Y’all” is a tremendously useful contraction, giving us, as TheRotund points out, a second-person plural pronoun.  Lots of other languages have these, along with verb tenses to match, and while dabbling in learning Spanish and Italian I found a new appreciation for the clarity and robustness of them.  English does not have an equivalent.  I don’t know about youall, but it’s a lack that I frequently feel when I’m writing informally to an audience of more than one or two.

I don’t think there’s any hope, at this point, of bringing “y’all” or “youall” into common use as a way to fill the gap left by that missing pronoun.

First, I think that doing so would be jarring.  It would be a change in tone, a diction drop, to use it in the midst of a scholarly work of nonfiction, or a non-dialectical work of fiction, and it would disrupt the reader’s concentration. As a writer, I place a lot of importance on that.

Even though it is a useful word, we don’t use it and we aren’t used to it, and I think the reason is that the words are tied up in heavily class-influenced and race-influenced patterns of thought.  That’s the other reason I think it can’t be reclaimed and used in formal speech. There are simply too many deeply-ingrained cultural issues surrounding “proper” or “correct” English.  Some are fueled by legitimate concerns; most are fueled by prejudice, ignorance, and misunderstanding.

In informal speech, however, I see no reason not to use “y’all”, or further its use.

The one concern I have about informal dialectical speech is that sometimes it is so dialectical it impairs the ability to communicate and be understood.

The primary importance of a word is whether or not it is understood by the listener or reader.  If it isn’t, that is a problem.  That problem should not be used to make a judgment against either speaker or listener.  That problem lies between two people, not with any one of them or their dialect, and the solution must be found somewhere in between as well.  People must learn to understand one another, not relegate one way of speaking to the trash bin so that one group doesn’t have to be bothered understanding a dialect that is beneath them, while the other group is left to bridge the gap on their own.

People raised with heavily dialectical speech are already taught, often in a very diminishing, ugly way, how to communicate “correctly” with people outside their dialectical group, and while I don’t have numbers to support this, I’m willing to bet that there are relatively few who cannot, when called upon, do this.  It’s a survival issue.  You need to know how to do it when you are dealing with people who would look down on you if you did not, in situations where you have a lot to lose.

People raised speaking “correctly” are not encouraged to learn anything about dialects, and are, in fact, carefully taught that dialects are “wrong.”  Along with this comes a whole host of ideas about people who use them: they are poor, uneducated, unsophisticated.  Learning to speak like those people, or condoning their way of speech, would be condoning their bad behavior — and being poor, being uneducated, being unsophisticated are considered deliberate behaviors in our culture.

Because we so vigorously enforce “correct” language through both school and culture, people tend to think that anyone with a dialectical way of speaking — or, for some people, if they use even one dialectical phrase — is either rejecting “correct” speech out of hateful stubbornness, or is simply too stupid to learn it.

“Y’all” kind of embodies that part of this whole struggle.

Everyone understands the actual meaning of the word.  Nobody’s going to wonder what you meant when you say “I’d like to see y’all on Thursday.”  It presents no cognitive barrier to communication.  It’s not an actual impediment to being understood.

The only problems with it are all the other things people understand about it, those ugly things all tied into how much money you have and what color your skin is and where in town you live and whether you went to college.  If there is a problem with “y’all”, it’s the problem illustrated so beautifully by the original poster: as soon as you use it, some people cease wanting to communicate, and throw up a wall of ugliness.

This is the real problem. This is the thing that needs to go.

“Y’all” is not a problem.  All y’all who think that people who use that word are ignorant hicks are the problem.

Now that we’ve settled that, I’m going to bring an EVEN WORSE phrase into the conversation:

“ALL Y’ALL.”

I am sure that at some point, someone has made a definitive study of “y’all” and “all y’all” and how they are used.  Language scholars are nothing if not enthusiastic about subtle distinctions.  In my experience, which involves actually using the phrase but not being an English scholar, “all y’all” is used under the following circumstances:

When the speaker is addressing a group of people numbering more than four or five.  “When I saw all y’all discussing second-person pronouns, I knew there were going to be fireworks.”

When the speaker is addressing a large group of people with the intent of singling them out or gathering them together.  “All y’all who have a problem with dialectical English, please try to keep an open mind.”

When the speaker is addressing a person within a group of people, wanting to include another group of people not present through communication with that person.  This one is tricky to articulate!  “Okay, class, I want you to write about second-person pronouns in Romance languages!  Jamie, when you see your family, you tell them I’ll be glad to help them understand why second-person pronouns are important.  All y’all are welcome to come by to talk about it anytime.”

As emphasis, either to emphasize the universiality of the sentence in which it appears, or to emphasize the together-ness of a group. It can be a subtle distinction between the other uses, but it is distinct.  “It really is an important issue, and the judgmental attitude it embodies is for-real offensive.  So all y’all need to quiet down and stop acting like a bunch of jerks over dialectical pronouns.  I personally don’t use these words all that often.  Still, I don’t judge all y’all who do.”

There is also “youall,” which I used above.  It’s a distinct thing of its own, and as it’s slightly more formal, I tend to use that instead of “y’all”.  The subtleties of its use, however, are even more complicated and even harder to articulate, so I will leave it for another time, or for someone else to tackle.

And with that, I believe I am done.  Y’all have a nice day now, and c’mon back.

it really bothers me when people don’t realize how much privilege is just reeking

ethiopienne:

from statements like “i vote conservative because of my fiscal beliefs even though i’m socially liberal”

you are LITERALLY saying your own damn wallet matters significantly more to you than the livelihoods (and lives, in many cases) of PoC, LGBTQIA folk, cis-women and everyone else who needs and deserves access to basic reproductive health services, non-European immigrants, Muslims and people who “look” Muslim, the unemployed poor AND the working poor (hey didya know many of the people at and below the poverty line hold jobs, often 2 or 3?), etc…

people who do not have the freedom to vote “with their wallets” instead of with their identities, people who are increasingly losing the “guaranteed” right to vote AT ALL (hint: that’s GOP strategy, not a coincidence)

and if you think capitalism, especially unregulated capitalism, doesn’t DIRECTLY FUEL the perennial subjugation, genocide, rape, and brutalization of the “special identities” whose lives are worth less to you than your own wallet…

then i guess i don’t need to try any harder to prove my point about privilege, do i?

(via karnythia)

Re-blog if you want your followers to tell you one thing they secretly like about you.

triangularisthepie:

static-nonsense:

kiriamaya:

ceasesilence:

Okay, we can do this if you want to.

Sure, why not.

ok, could use the pick-me-up

Okay! I am pretty sure “your blog” will be approx nowhere in any responses I get, given how rampantly self-indulgent and whiny it is

It’s already been a rough week so I am going to give this a try.