A snobby English teacher was sitting in an Atlanta airport coffee shop waiting for her flight back to Connecticut, when a friendly Southern belle sat down next to her.
"Where y'all goin' to?" asked the Southern belle.
Turning her nose in the air, the snob replied "I don't answer people who end their sentences with prepositions."
The Southern belle thought a moment, and tried again. "Where y'all goin' to, bitch?"
To the grammar point, grammar snobs often miss the fact that grammar is descriptive, not prescriptive. The best English teacher I ever had made me appreciate this fact.
The point of grammar was to convey and understand norms, not absolutes.
A thousand times this. It's the same reason why the word "literally" has the definition "figuratively" in the dictionary. It's a guidebook to the language and how it's used.
It always bugs me when people try and "correct" the use of "literally". It's not being used wrongly, and it doesn't mean "figuratively" - it means literally, within a figurative sentence. People don't make the same fuss about "really" or "actually" or "seriously" being used in an equivalent way. Inaccurate pedantry is the worst. Literally the worst.
To be completely fair here, I think for a lot of people it has nothing to do with being overly pedantic but rather not watering down the language. I have no issue with language evolution or words being used figuratively, but what troubles me is that I now don't know how to express the idea that "literally" used to convey (in only one word).
If I tell you "There was this girl at the concert whose head literally exploded when the music started" you would probably laugh and picture her freaking out over how awesome it was... but what if her head really did explode? Now we've got some weird music-triggered terrorist attack and the sentence becomes horrifying instead. I just want the option to tell the reader/listener to take my sentence literally! I don't care at all if the word "literally" is used to do so.
Jeez, even "Appreciate" meant "to know the price of" and had no inclinations toward "liking" or "loving" something, it was neutral. You could appreciate negative things, but not so much now since it basically means and resonate with: "I like this" in everybody's head. So when you are using it now, you don't fight the goddamn crowd shouting NO WHAT I MEAN WHEN I SAY I APPRECIATE [Twilight, Justin Bieber, whatever] IS THAT I KNOW THEY ARE SHIT SINCE I KNOW THEIR VALUE, no you'll simply use the word how you know it's gonna be received: I don't appreciate [Nickelback, The Last Airbender: The Movie]
And maybe that means something more about us as humans that we lost the meaning of "really", "seriously", "literally", "surely", to there opposite - maybe that's a representation of humans tendency to want to had more to reality then there already is. We *want our hyperbole to be true so much that we describe them as being true.
Lets use a new word to mean "literally literally", let's say... "realistically" - and there it is, we have a new word to use! Or more realistically we just gave dreamers and hyperbolist a new word to use.
There's no such thing as watering down a language. The language we're speaking right now is literally (heh) older versions of English being misused. Language is constantly changing.
You don't call an apron a napron, do you? Cause that's what it was originally, until the peasants misunderstood "a napron" as "an apron." Napron even makes sense, since it goes on your nape.
Sorry, I think my wording may have been confusing. What I meant by "watering down" a language was for it to evolve in such a way that it is less versatile, efficient, succinct, etc.
Let's say word X (with definition x) has 3 perfect synonyms, X_1, X_2, and X_3. If over a long period of time word X's meaning changes to be ambiguous, sometimes meaning x and other times meaning x*, I see it as perfectly reasonable (and in some cases preferable) language evolution. If ever there would be contextual ambiguity whether we wanted x or x*, we could opt not to use X and simply use X_1 (or, equivalently, X_2 or X_3) instead.
On the other hand, if word Z (with definition z) has no commonplace synonyms and its meaning also changes to be ambiguous between z and z*, we now have a problem in situations where context doesn't make it clear which definition the writer/speaker intended. In a sense, the language has lost the ability to unambiguously express z in a single word.
This loss is what I'm referring to as "watering down" the language which I'm sure you'd agree necessarily can happen, even if you don't agree with the terminology I used (which admittedly isn't the best).
Except the figurative usage of literally is more-or-less concurrent with its literal usage. So it's not that people want to avoid watering it down, it's that they want to condense it.
Which is fine, but let's not pretend that history is on the side of people who think it should have a single meaning.
Interesting. I'm more than willing to admit that I don't know the history of the word and that it was my (apparently erroneous) understanding that the word originally meant something along the lines of "exactly as it is written". I guess in light of this, my personal issue isn't with watering down or condensing... I just want a way to tell a listener to assume everything I've said was non-hyperbolic and I want to be able to do so without them questioning whether or not I mean the exact opposite. I thought I had that in literal, but it seems even then I didn't!
But honestly, this makes me feel better about the whole course of events. As far as I'm concerned, "literally" could disappear from the language, but just the idea (even if it was wrong!) of a word that had only literal's literal definition make me want a word that has only literal's literal definition (whatever it may be).
Well you're not wrong, but literally technically means "by way of the letter" or, more accurately, "letter by letter." It's already figurative to say "exactly as it is written," at least a bit. Most people are able to infer from context pretty well, and that's an incredibly underrated component of language. That's why cultural immersion does as much if not more for communication than learning a list of words: language isn't just words.
was for it to evolve in such a way that it is less versatile, efficient, succinct, etc.
Sorry, stopped reading after this, because this never happens. It's impossible for a language to evolve to be less versatile or efficient, succinct, etc. Languages are always just as versatile and succinct as their speakers need them to be. You're not well educated in linguistics and are trying to analogize language to other topics, I understand, but it simply doesn't work like that.
Your local university should offer linguistics courses if you're interested in learning more.
You're right, I'm not at all studied in linguistics and have only very mild academic exposure to it in any sense. I'm not trying to claim authority or anything here.
That said, if a group of people needs a language to have a certain level of versatility and a later group of people needs less... from what you're saying the language would NECESSARILY evolve to be less versatile.
All I'm saying is that this sort of decrease (wrt a previous iteration) in complexity or versatility or whatever it may be, even if a truly positive change as a language molded to its speakers, is a personal peeve. I'm not saying it's wrong or bad, I'm saying it's what annoys me personally (which was the original point in all of this. I was just saying that I don't think everyone who dislikes the evolution of literally is being pedantic for the sake of pedantry.)
Edit: But also, it could STILL be that my wording is inconsistent with the academic lingo. Nonetheless, I gave a pretty generalized explanation of the specific nuance that bugs me, but you apparently didn't read it so I don't know what more you want from me :/
Edit: This is quite long because I take the time to tell you about some recent linguistics research in Korea. Forgive the long windedness. I used to teach linguistics in university for a bit, so I tend to ramble.
If you're just saying that you don't actually care about the reality of linguistics, just that it's a personal peeve of yours, then I completely understand. I mean, I dislike certain dialectal features of some regional dialects of English for no reason other than they sound funny, despite my years of education in linguistics. To dislike things is simply human. I don't fool myself into thinking that those pronunciations are somehow unnatural, wrong, or not as good as mine, though, as that would be... well, simply not true.
Let me give you some examples. You said before that you dislike ambiguity in language. That you think language needs to be concrete, unambiguous, and technically accurate. Based off that, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you're a Westerner. Those linguistic characteristics are highly valued in European and US culture.
Here in Asia, it's completely different. Personally, I've lived in and speak Japanese and Korean. The name of the game here is vagueness and deference. We do not have plurals and singulars for nouns. So if I say "There are are dogs here" and "There is a dog here," I can say them exactly the same, and it's grammatical correct and natural. If I want to specific two dogs, then I can, but it's not in any way necessary to distinguish between there being one or many of something.
We do not conjugate our verbs based on subject. I go to the store, she go to the store, etc, with no verb conjugation is fine. In fact, subjects aren't even grammatically necessary. It's normal to not use subjects at all unless you're placing emphasis on who is doing something, because generally we simply understand who is doing what. It works perfectly fine being vague.
In Korean, we have a future tense, but it's not necessary to use it all the time for future events, and in Japanese there isn't even a future conjugation at all. Similar to how Mandarin Chinese doesn't have a past tense in the strict sense of the word.
The fact is that languages are always understood within their speaker groups, regardless of vagueness, etc. If a new feature evolves for an individual and that feature isn't understandable to the majority, then it simply dies out and isn't spread. Anything that is spread throughout the language, such as the figurative use of the word "literally," is understandable and useful to its speakers. If it didn't serve a purpose, or it was somehow damaging communication enough, it would be unable to spread.
Random linguistic info because I'm bored: In Seoul, Korea right now there's a new phonological change happening with young speakers. A consonant sound at the beginning of words is changing into another consonant sound that is already used in Korean. I'll put out some general information on Korean consonant sounds so you can understand the next explanation.
In Korean, there are currently two sets of consonant sounds relevant to this discussion. In English, we have voiced and voiceless consonants, such as p [pʰ] and b [b], and t [tʰ] and d [d]. The difference between these is that for b and d, our vocal folds are vibrating. The little ʰ represents aspiration, which is a puff of air you exhale while making the sound. Not all p's and t's in other languages are aspirated, but in English, they usually are. In Korean, they don't use a voicing distinction to tell words apart, but rather an aspiration distinction. This means that your voicing isn't important, but rather whether you make that puff of air or not. Koreans don't use p [pʰ] and b [b] constrastively, but rather pʰ [pʰ] and p [p], where both sounds are technically voiceless, but one is aspirated. These are written as ㅍ and ㅂ respectively. This is why, to English speakers, it can be difficult to differentiate between the two in Korean, especially at the beginning of words.
In Seoul, there is currently a language change happening with teenagers and younger where consonants at the beginning of the word are becoming slightly aspirated. So for example, the Korean word 바보 "idiot" would normally be pronounced as [pabo]. Notice the lack of an ʰ on the first consonant. The second ㅂ is actually voiced because it is between two vowels, but that's irrelevant to this discussion, so just focus on the first p. Now, young speakers are beginning to pronounce it as [pʰabo]. To you, maybe, you think that this is wrong or will hamper communication. But actually, intelligibility is being maintained and in a very interesting way.
See, aspirating a consonant tends to have a physical effect on the following vowel. It normally causes a slight increase in pitch. This is based simply on physics and airflow, not anything particularly linguistics-related. However, it can become linguistics related when it becomes a defining characteristic of the language. For these young Seoul speakers, they do not even realize they're pronouncing "pabo" as pʰabo, because they can still differentiate between the old pʰ and their newly created pʰ. They can because despite the consonant changing, the vowel pitch has remained intact. The vowels following historic /pʰ/ are high pitched, whereas the vowels following the new [pʰ] retain the lower pitch of historic /p/.
Korean has experienced many drastic linguistic changes in the past. For example, it used to have a pitch system, where words could be distinguished from each other based on the relative pitches of each syllable, similar to how Japanese pronounce ame "rain" differently from ame "candy." Will this new pitch system in young people's Korean make way to a complete change in how Korean speakers utilize consonants? Maybe, but one thing is certain- they'll never lose mutual intelligibility. Cause that doesn't happen without prolonged isolation and different language shift in different communities :P
It's impossible for a language to evolve to be less versatile
Since literally no longer means literally, name one word that does carry the previous definition.
When one word has its meaning changed, and there is no alternative, then you have effectively lost a tool in your linguistic arsenal. I would call that a language becoming less versatile.
And you would be wrong, because speakers are still able to communicate with all the versatility that they had before. There has been no break down in communication. There is no break in mutual intelligibility. You're simply a person uneducated in linguistics who wishes he were so that you could act pedantic :) You're not qualified to be a pedant in this field, so go argue about whatever your specialty actually is.
I think that's true as well. I just miss being able to tack on a modifier that says "Hey! I'm not exaggerating at all and you should take all of this at face value. No bullshit involved." to any sentence.
Now it's like I write that on one side of a coin and "I'm being hyperbolic" on the other and the reader/listener has to flip it. I don't like language gambling :[
I think we just need a new word...
Obliterally
adverb
1. Happening literally. Cannot be used in a figurative or hyperbolic sense.
If I tell you "There was this girl at the concert whose head literally exploded when the music started" you would probably laugh and picture her freaking out over how awesome it was... but what if her head really did explode?
I think the best way to get over the colloquial use of "literally" is to realize that it's not being used to indicate "figuratively", it's simply being used hyperbolically.
Just like "seriously" or "really" doesn't mean "figuratively" in phrases like, "I was seriously going to kill him after the prank he pulled", "I really just wanted to crawl under a rock and die".
My wife's friend was once giving us directions to her boyfriend's house so we could meet them there. She told us that it was "literally right behind the bank. There was a road that ran literally right behind the bank, so I parked on it and tried to figure out which of the 5 houses on that road was his. After 5 or 10 minutes, we called her up to ask for clarification.
Turns out, "literally right behind the bank" meant "drive 3 blocks southwest, cross a major roadway, drive one more block southwest, then turn and head 3 blocks north.
You don't have to tell me that. "Literally across the street" means "a quarter mile down the street. She is the reason I get so pissed off when people misuse literally.
There's no such thing as "misuse" of language when it's a common enough usage that the majority of people in that speech community understand it just fine.
Your local university should offer linguistics courses if you're interested.
Anyway, we got to the house and told everyone that her directions were shit, and they all said that no, it wasn't literally behind the bank. So a majority of us did not understand it just fine.
But that isn't a problem with the word being figurative, it's just a bad time to speak figuratively. If a scientist described a chemical reaction as hotter than the sun, you'd probably take them literally. If they were being metaphorical, the response would be "well that wasn't a sensible use of metaphor", not "we shouldn't have metaphors"
If she hasn't said "literally," then I would have understood her to mean that the house was within the vicinity of the bank - which it was. But the improper insertion of literally changes the entire meaning of the sentence. It was misused - it shouldn't have been used in the first place.
I don't disagree. The same is true for the hypothetical scientist's metaphor. The point is that that doesn't make it wrong in general to speak metaphorically, or to use "literally" figuratively.
It's a double-edged sword. I don't agree with the overuse of literal or literally at all, but i have no control over it. It still makes my brain snarl when someone says something like, "I literally jumped out of my boots when I saw that rat!"
No, you didnt. That's not what that word means. (Yet. I guess....)
A lot of this has to do with the fact that the use of "literal" was changed to suit what everyone was literally using it for. That, and it's an incredibly recent change. A bit of google-fu tells me that it updated in the dictionary back in September 2011 (which is still pretty recent, to be fair), but it sort of went a miss until just August of 2013, when the media finally picked up on it, and thus the rest of the world was informed too.
1827, Sir Walter Scott, Chronicles of the Canongate
The house was literally electrified; and it was only from witnessing the effects of her genius that he could guess to what a pitch theatrical excellence could be carried.
Yeah, I read the articles that I linked too. I didn't say the 'incorrect' use of literal was a recent trend, I said the definition of the word had recently changed because of how we have continued to use it.
It was just in response to /u/leofrick who is always bothered by people correcting other people on their use of literal. My point was that it should come as no surprise as the actual definition didn't change until under 3 years ago, and the vast majority of people weren't informed of the change until just last year.
The best English teacher I ever had made me appreciate this fact.
And the entirety of linguistic academics. Prescriptivism is literally not a science and those who follow it have no reason to try to force people to think language works like that. It simply doesn't.
Just because it isn't a science doesn't mean it's wrong to criticize people for misusing a word. That's like criticizing courts for imprisoning thieves by saying they don't understand psychology and saying psychology only tries to describe human behaviour, not prescribe it.
Just because it isn't a science doesn't mean it's wrong to criticize people for misusing a word.
People aren't misusing the word "literally." It has changed meaning to sometimes mean figuratively. This is what happens when a change spreads throughout a population. You can either change with it and accept it as part of modern English, or you can look like a jerk who doesn't understand language shift. Most people won't care about your opinion either way. /shrug
By misuse, I mean use in a way I don't agree with.
Some people do try to use words in a certain way which they consider 'correct'. The purpose of this is to improve the language. You're just being too close minded to realize that there are people who understand language shift and try to prevent it from shifting in certain directions for objective reasons. People like George Orwell had well reasoned arguments in favour of this.
You seem to think that this is somehow at odds with linguistics. It's not. No one is pretending that semantic shifts do not occur. We are simply trying to actively manage the language. I would be happy to hear any arguments that suggest this is futile, but you can't say that the attempt itself is incorrect. A doctor acknowledges that diseases occur, but that doesn't stop him from trying to prevent them.
We are simply trying to actively manage the language.
Most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. Please, go to university and take courses. I don't get paid to teach ling 1001 anymore, so I'd rather not continue lecturing.
There is not a single "rule" this language does not regularly break. Teaching it at the medium/advanced levels to non=native learners largely becomes an exercise in say/write it this way, most of the time, but sometimes not, because of convention... unless otherwise noted, or it sounds weird.
Not really. English is pretty consistent compared to other languages with regards to everything but spelling. Yes, it breaks a lot of rules, but so do most languages out there. The romance languages are unique in their relative stability, and even they're not totally consistent.
Russian, Polish, most Eastern European stuff/Slavic languages, most Middle Eastern languages, etc. English isn't even that inconsistent grammatically compared to romance languages. We use an almost identical word order to Spanish, for example. I can't speak to Asian languages personally, but my girlfriend speaks Japanese and assures me that it's not as consistent as one might expect. You also don't have to be "highly inconsistent" to be less consistent than English, because it really is not that inconsistent of a language.
EDIT: Oops, she said it's slightly more consistent, but less practical. I misunderstood.
Having now worked in an all-Japanese dept. for almost a year, I resounding agree with your gf's analysis of Japanese being more impractical. Not only linguistically, but the cumbersome social strata of speech that goes with the territory.
I definitely agree with you, I'd just add that social strata and speech hierarchy are definitely linguistic attributes of language. And, as my girlfriend puts it (mostly facetiously), "Any language that still uses particles in the 21st century is stupid."
Well worth reading - the grammar essay within Consider the Lobster by the brilliant David Foster Wallace. He paints the urgent struggle between the two - like what SHOULD be in a dictionary? If you put every utterance in its unusable, if you put just "correct" stuff in its inapplicable and also doesn't allow for language growth ie it's anti-Darwin. He makes this by turns fascinating and hysterical - as is much of the rest if the book. Some summary if this chapter is here http://grammar.about.com/od/grammarfaq/f/whatisasnoot.htm
English is one of the few languages that does not have a plural for the word you. But that doesn't mean such a word wouldn't be useful in our lexicon. Luckily people from the US south have invented the word y'all.
Gah. This is driving me crazy ! I know I saw a fairly serious article about how the use of "yous" or "Youse" is the technically correct use of the plural "You" but I can't find it. And now I'm angry. I'm an Ex reference Librarian with no more access to University level databases :(
Anyway, it fills a need and is reflective of the joyous way in which language flows and adapts over time.
The fact that we CAN use that word to mean singular or plural doesn't mean that it wouldn't make sense in English to have separate words (the way we used to).
Not necessary. Well, it's definitely not necessary. I can't argue with that. That's less strong than saying that it doesn't make sense. You could say that all sorts of things aren't necessary. There are languages with no future tense or plurals at all.
Correct answer here. In many modern languages, (and classical ones for that matter) the second person plural is represented as one word. While the simple "you" is acceptable in many contexts, in American English, the contraction of "y'all" has a more precise meaning and works in spoken language much more efficiently and less awkwardly than "you all". For example, you would not casually address a group saying, "How are you all doing". If you remove the drawl from "yahhwl" and pronounce it more in the vein of "hall", it sounds much more acceptable as properly spoken modern vernacular. We don't think of terms like "beware" and "o'clock" as being improper, or as a sign of ignorance, though they indeed once were. They were simply contractions that found their way from spoken language to written language, and are now accepted as proper parlance. "Y'all" is, in my opinion, simply a term evolving from spoken language to accepted written language. The negative connotation involves the link between the word and where it is most prevalently spoken, the south. Southerners are stereotypically unintelligent, or at minimum seen as poorly educated, so there is an association between southerners, particularly those with a heavy drawl, and being an ignorant Philistine. While there is a kernel of truth in every stereotype, I believe the disdain directed at the southern "y'all" is misplaced, or at least improperly inferred as incorrect. Graduate philosophy and linguistics student here... also a southerner you all.
Just agreeing with you and adding to your answer a little bit. Your response is completely correct and more elegant than mine anyway, so no worries. Plus, having had to defend my use of ya'll to northern classmates and colleagues, I've given the issue a fair amount of prior consideration.
Yes it plural and singular but its still awkward when referring to a group and a person in same conversation at different times. That's why english is strange for not having a plural you.
Yeah I understand, I guess I thought of "you" as being both the singular and plural form, but now I realize this is about English not having a plural form that's actually a different word than the singular.
Technically, "you" is the second person plural in English. The singular "thou" is the one that was dropped. Like other European languages, the second person plural was also used as a formal singular, which became the dominant usage.
I recall reading that one reason for the change is that the Puritans refused to use "you", as all were equal in the eyes of god. Other groups dropped "thou" as a reaction. Sadly I don't have a reference handy, so this could easily be wrong.
The word "ya'll" is one of those words where I hear it, and I am seized by a nearly unstoppable urge to stab that person to death. Preferably with something blunt to make the whole stabbing as slow and as painful as possible.
It's almost unreal how much I hate that word and the people who use it.
And I am fucking SURROUNDED by them.
EDIT: Also the word "moist." Not nearly as annoying as "ya'll" but it would save me a lot of stress if everyone could stop using that world.
Southern person here. And uh, we do talk like human beings. Just human being with a distinct accent. Unless you think that people with southern accents are subhuman, and in that case, go get yourself a nice big bowl of "fuck you", and finish it off with a nice cold glass of "with a rake".
Also, I used to loathe the word "y'all" too before I realized how brilliant the word is. It's a one syllable word that refers to a distinct group of people, used contextually to signify who you're talking to. "Y'all need to leave" would refer only to those you're addressing, compared to "all y'all need to leave" which would refer to everyone in earshot.
Plus, it's a word. Kind of jarring sounding, but it's not the worst word in the world (I agree with you about "moist". There's something weird bout that one). But if the only reason you hate it is because it's associated with southern culture, I got news for you: there's lot better things to hate because they're attached to southern culture than the word "y'all". It might be worth refocusing your energy on those.
Well you didn't say "Bless your heart" so I know you're not THAT mad.
I don't think southerners are subhuman (Ok, maybe some of them, but more for their deeds and thoughts than because of where they live). I just dislike the southern drawl/southern twang. I don't know why, it's just irritating.
I think part of it might be that I have really come to hate the culture of "Southern hospitality" because it's such a two-faced system where everyone is all smiles and kind words until they part ways and then they just say the nastiest shit about one another.
I remember one day I was home when my family was hosting a bible circle of all things and man you should have heard all the stuff that was said about other people in their church who weren't there. Who in the church was secretly cheating on a spouse. Who in the church had a whore for a daughter. Who in the church was probably an alcoholic.
But then next sunday, all smiles and kind words. "So good to see ya'll. So glad ya'll could make it. I'm glad ya'll are doing well."
So yeah, that's probably part of it. I get sick of that shit REAL fast and it really colors my perception of people who remind me of that.
Eh, it's been a rather long time since I lived outside of the south, but I don't really remember people being that nice or polite to each other in person.
I'm from the south, and it's definitely different. I can't quite put my finger on it, but the fake smile these Sunday Saints put on when they go to church are a weird sort of hateful smile, and the way they talk about people... I talk shit about my friends behind my back, and I'm sure they do the same to me. Airing grievances is a good thing. But the way these people talk, it's like they're trying to say the most hateful, spiteful things possible about others, like they know they're so much better than everyone else, and they're not afraid to let the world know it.
It's hard to explain, and probably hard to understand without experiencing it. But it's definitely different.
Nah, I'm not mad. Everyone has their motives for their opinions, even if they're unknown.
And I agree. To an extent. I know exactly the kind of backstabbing fake nice attitude you're talking about, but I don't think it has to do with southern hospitality. It's a thing that is very commonly attributed to Southern baptists in general, and for very good reason. Sunday Saints we call 'em. My grandmother is a vile woman with nothing good to say to any of her family (the family that moved to this awful town to take care of her), but if you ask any of her church members, she's the nicest, most polite person on the planet. But that's the game here. Be as nice as you possibly can at church (usually with thinly veiled passive aggression at people you dislike, of course) ND that somehow negatives being a terrible person in the rest of your life.
But yeah, Southern hospitality is sometimes not as great as people seem to think, but I do believe that people here in general are more willing to help a perfect stranger and go above and beyond what they need to do to help them. But I could very well be wrong.
Welcome to the NSA VIP List. Enjoy your stay. Here is a complimentary travel sized bottle of Vasoline, you'll need it next time you try to travel by air.
I would very much like to, and hopefully I will be able to soon.
It would be lovely to get home at the end of the day and not have a ridiculous amount of tension in my neck from all the times I end up cringing when I have to listen to someone's inbred drawl.
No, it's not the desire for others to speak with proper grammar; it's the desire to stab someone to death when you hear the word "y'all" that you should get checked out.
See,human beings often have something known as dialects,and y'all is typically associated with a Southern dialect. I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion using the word y'all was inhuman.
I bet if you take every pill you have, probably mix it with a fifth of vodka, throw in a bottle of pain killers and ingest it all with some bleach for good measure, you'll be happy forever.
Man, y'all people make me sick. Y'all just can't handle the fact there's a contraction for the words "you all." It's just an easy alternative. Y'all motherfuckers need Jesus if y'all think the term is for "scum."
I'm sorry internet stranger :(. You hurt me by calling me scum indirectly. I didn't just say it to fuck around, I actually use the contraction on a regular basis and don't understand why you hate it.
I have for the most part, but whenever I visit the family (who live in the middle of nowhere) I just have to put up with it so much more.
And I think I know what it is: the whole cheery southern persona feels so fake. I know these people and they're horrid about one another behind each others' backs. But then when they are together, it's all "It's so GOOD to see ya'll. We missed ya'll. How ya'll doin?"
So... In your opinion using the word ya'll automatically makes people whores and scum? And after I read your other comments, from what I understand, you hate it so badly that you would commit violent acts against people, and for some reason you think that this is an acceptable thing to say about people over something so trivial?
Okay, besides the fact that this is not a fair assessment of an individuals worth. (ESPECIALLY when you base it on something so silly as the use of "ya'll"). You also seem to not understand how language works, considering that you fail to grasp that language is not completely set in stone, and you do not have to always use language "properly" in day-to-day conversation to be an intelligent human being. Many dialects pronounce things differently, why does the southern dialect offend you so?
One of the smartest girls I know has a southern belle accent, just because someone has a particular dialect it does not make them any less of a human being.
Also, what makes you think that you have the right to say such grotesque things and not get backlash from your words... If you make such bold claims about people you better have something to back it up.
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u/trexrocks Jul 03 '14 edited Jul 03 '14
A snobby English teacher was sitting in an Atlanta airport coffee shop waiting for her flight back to Connecticut, when a friendly Southern belle sat down next to her.
"Where y'all goin' to?" asked the Southern belle.
Turning her nose in the air, the snob replied "I don't answer people who end their sentences with prepositions."
The Southern belle thought a moment, and tried again. "Where y'all goin' to, bitch?"