Posted by
Doctor Demex on Tuesday, September 26, 2006 8:30:25 PM
[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 1, 2006]
Because I was reared in the South—inside the Capitol Beltway in
northern Virginia, which to true southerners makes me practically a
Yankee—I have been questioned and even ridiculed about the illiterate
and slovenly way southerners speak. When I attended an elite Ivy League
college, my more enlightened classmates from New England immediately
categorized me as an illiterate racist cracker, because of two small
idiosyncrasies in my own dialect: I pronounced the word "ruin" as
a one-syllable word that almost rhymes with groin, based on a
Romance-language-based pronunciation of the letter "i" as a long "e,"
rather than as the short "i" in the word "in": I said "rooeen" instead
of the allegedly more literate two-syllable "roo-in." I thought
it was ironic that I had learned to pronounce ruin "like a typical
southern bigot" from my mother, who was born in Oregon and reared in
Detroit. The other giveaway of my linguistic barbarism was my
pronunciation of the word "any" as "iny," like the belly button.
Many southerners pronounce all sorts of short a's and short e's like
short i's. Fortunately, I pronounced the word pen like pen
instead of like pin, saving me from having to clarify it with a
modifier. Because Southerners pronounce both pen and pin like
"pin," they have to remember to use the term "straight pin" when
they're in sewing classes up north. Down south, a straight pin is
just a pin, while a writing pen is an "ink pin."
What occasions this piece today is the flowering of sweet
justice: One of the questions I got from my enlightened northern
friends, and which I continue to get to this day here on the Lake Erie
shore where I'm well ensconced among them, is why southerners say
"y'all" when they mean "you." I explain patiently that the
critics apparently haven't been listening closely enough to learn the
grammatical rules, for "y'all" (obviously a contraction of "you all")
evolved from a courteous desire to be even more precise in
speaking. In Standard English the second-person singular and
second-person plural are exactly the same: "you." When more than
one person might be in the room, "you" might lead to confusion about
whether the speaker is addressing a certain person or all of
them. For this reason, "y'all" preserves a distinction that
permits more clarity and precision. Only the most observant
Northerner would notice that y'all is never used when addressing just
one person.
The advantage of this manner of speaking, which Yankees call stupid and
slovenly, has finally been recognized in certain northern dialects with
the inclusion in most new dictionaries of a particular northern variety
of the second-person plural, namely, "youse." Curiously, the
silent "e" at the end does nothing to distinguish the pronunciation of
"youse" from douse, grouse, house, louse, mouse, and rouse. To
most southerners, "youse" is a pretty strong hint that the speaker is
from the north, because it's usually surrounded by a lot of other
mispronounced and misused words. [Cf. "Hey, youse guys!" when
addressing females.] Still, "youse" has never been used to paint
with a broad brush all Yankees as illiterate; just the white
trash.