Howdy y'all!
24/11/21 02:02
Our son did his graduate work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. When he was a student there, I proudly had a UNC sticker in the back window of my pickup and I enjoyed ribbing a friend of mine who graduated from Duke, saying, “No matter where you go in this world, when you look up at the sky on a cloudless day, you’ll see Carolina Blue.” Another joke phrase that I used at that time went something like this: “After raising our children in the deep southern culture of SOUTH Dakota, we decided that in order to be fully educated we needed to send our son up north for some Yankee culture, so we sent him to NORTH Carolina.”
I suppose that part of the reason I made jokes about it is that I have very little direct experience with the American South. I’ve been to church meetings in Texas, Florida and Georgia and when our son was a student at UNC, we made two road trips from South Dakota to North Carolina. This past summer we drove to South Carolina where our daughter now lives. Most of our lives, however, we and the majority of our relatives have lived in the northwestern part of the US. My father, my wife and both of our children were born in North Dakota. I, my mother and my siblings were born in Montana. And now we live in the northwestern corner of Washington, which is about as far northwest as you can go in the United States without heading to Alaska.
Our daughter is the person in our immediate family with the most experience with southern culture. Her husband was born and raised in Virginia. They lived in Missouri for five years. And now they have moved to South Carolina. We noticed that as soon as they moved to Missouri our daughter began to use the term “y’all.” After five years in Missouri it was so much a part of her vocabulary that we weren’t surprised during the next five years of her life when we received her greetings from Japan with the phrase.
I like that phrase. It seems to carry a sense of what is good about the American South - a sense of down-home hospitality and comfortableness with other people. When I try to use a fake southern accent, something at which I am no good at all, I make frequent use of the phrase. Don’t y’all love it when you hear y’all? Since I’ve lived my whole life with a short name, I enjoy going down south where my name has two syllables. Y’all call me Ta-ed down south.
Recently, however, I noticed one of my friends chiding an Australian friend for using the phrase on social media. “Are y’all trying to masquerade as an American?” It seems to me that if Yankees and now even Australians are using the term, it is well on its way to becoming a part of mainstream English. After all, it does appear int he Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary which points out that the correct spelling is y’all, not ya’ll. Once the OED starts correcting your spelling, you know you’ve gone beyond a regional dialect. But then y’all knew that already.
I don’t think I use the term in my writing very much, but I do find the phrase slipping into my conversation more and more. For the most part, I have simply used the plural you when I address a group of people. I used to occasionally use “you guys,” but I associate that phrase with the northeast, particularly parts of New York City, and I’ve never wanted to sound like I came from that particular city. I don’t have anything against New York, I’m just not a New Yorker despite my enjoyment of the magazine with the city’s name.
However, my consciousness of the positive nature of the phrase y’all has recently been raised by the use of it as a mantra by LGBTQ+ groups. “Y’all means all” is a way of encouraging the use of the phrase because it includes people of all gender identities as opposed to “you guys,” which is distinctly male in gender even though like y’all, it has been used to refer to groups of women or groups of mixed gender. There is definitely as sense that using “you guys” to refer to a mixed gender group emphasizes some members while excluding others. Being more conscious about my language choices probably means that I will use y’all more often.
I’m not worried about someone thinking that I’m from the south. Using a single phrase doesn’t constitute an accent. And I still use some particularly northern terms without thinking of them. Friends have often pointed out that I say “nort” when I say North Dakota and that i have a bit of midwestern twang when I refer to Minnesota (Minnesohtah). Seven winters of -30 temperatures have earned me the right to sound like the place left an impression on me.
I have noticed that our daughter has started to tweak the phrase. In a recent conversation she was commenting about how our house is starting to look like we are getting moved in by saying “y’all’s house is looking good.” I sort of thought that y’all is already plural, but I guess it might have a plural possessive, though y’all’s doesn’t quite roll off of my lips yet. So far, I don’t remember our daughter using “all y’all” (“I’m talking to all y’all).
Somewhere I read that British Airlines, Japan Airlines and Lufthansa have dropped the term “ladies and gentlemen,” from their cabin announcements, encouraging their employees to use the terms “everyone” or “attention all passengers.” I can imagine a cabin announcement on a Southwest Airlines flight beginning with, “Howdy, y’all,” but that isn’t the phrase I expect to hear on Japan Airlines anytime soon. As far as I know the Japan rail system still has “Ladies and gentlemen” as the address of its English language announcements.
I thank y’all for putting up with this little essay. I think I'm going to be using the phrase more often and if y’all start hearing it from a guy from Washington, y’all will know it is becoming standard American English fo’ sure!
I suppose that part of the reason I made jokes about it is that I have very little direct experience with the American South. I’ve been to church meetings in Texas, Florida and Georgia and when our son was a student at UNC, we made two road trips from South Dakota to North Carolina. This past summer we drove to South Carolina where our daughter now lives. Most of our lives, however, we and the majority of our relatives have lived in the northwestern part of the US. My father, my wife and both of our children were born in North Dakota. I, my mother and my siblings were born in Montana. And now we live in the northwestern corner of Washington, which is about as far northwest as you can go in the United States without heading to Alaska.
Our daughter is the person in our immediate family with the most experience with southern culture. Her husband was born and raised in Virginia. They lived in Missouri for five years. And now they have moved to South Carolina. We noticed that as soon as they moved to Missouri our daughter began to use the term “y’all.” After five years in Missouri it was so much a part of her vocabulary that we weren’t surprised during the next five years of her life when we received her greetings from Japan with the phrase.
I like that phrase. It seems to carry a sense of what is good about the American South - a sense of down-home hospitality and comfortableness with other people. When I try to use a fake southern accent, something at which I am no good at all, I make frequent use of the phrase. Don’t y’all love it when you hear y’all? Since I’ve lived my whole life with a short name, I enjoy going down south where my name has two syllables. Y’all call me Ta-ed down south.
Recently, however, I noticed one of my friends chiding an Australian friend for using the phrase on social media. “Are y’all trying to masquerade as an American?” It seems to me that if Yankees and now even Australians are using the term, it is well on its way to becoming a part of mainstream English. After all, it does appear int he Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary which points out that the correct spelling is y’all, not ya’ll. Once the OED starts correcting your spelling, you know you’ve gone beyond a regional dialect. But then y’all knew that already.
I don’t think I use the term in my writing very much, but I do find the phrase slipping into my conversation more and more. For the most part, I have simply used the plural you when I address a group of people. I used to occasionally use “you guys,” but I associate that phrase with the northeast, particularly parts of New York City, and I’ve never wanted to sound like I came from that particular city. I don’t have anything against New York, I’m just not a New Yorker despite my enjoyment of the magazine with the city’s name.
However, my consciousness of the positive nature of the phrase y’all has recently been raised by the use of it as a mantra by LGBTQ+ groups. “Y’all means all” is a way of encouraging the use of the phrase because it includes people of all gender identities as opposed to “you guys,” which is distinctly male in gender even though like y’all, it has been used to refer to groups of women or groups of mixed gender. There is definitely as sense that using “you guys” to refer to a mixed gender group emphasizes some members while excluding others. Being more conscious about my language choices probably means that I will use y’all more often.
I’m not worried about someone thinking that I’m from the south. Using a single phrase doesn’t constitute an accent. And I still use some particularly northern terms without thinking of them. Friends have often pointed out that I say “nort” when I say North Dakota and that i have a bit of midwestern twang when I refer to Minnesota (Minnesohtah). Seven winters of -30 temperatures have earned me the right to sound like the place left an impression on me.
I have noticed that our daughter has started to tweak the phrase. In a recent conversation she was commenting about how our house is starting to look like we are getting moved in by saying “y’all’s house is looking good.” I sort of thought that y’all is already plural, but I guess it might have a plural possessive, though y’all’s doesn’t quite roll off of my lips yet. So far, I don’t remember our daughter using “all y’all” (“I’m talking to all y’all).
Somewhere I read that British Airlines, Japan Airlines and Lufthansa have dropped the term “ladies and gentlemen,” from their cabin announcements, encouraging their employees to use the terms “everyone” or “attention all passengers.” I can imagine a cabin announcement on a Southwest Airlines flight beginning with, “Howdy, y’all,” but that isn’t the phrase I expect to hear on Japan Airlines anytime soon. As far as I know the Japan rail system still has “Ladies and gentlemen” as the address of its English language announcements.
I thank y’all for putting up with this little essay. I think I'm going to be using the phrase more often and if y’all start hearing it from a guy from Washington, y’all will know it is becoming standard American English fo’ sure!
