Derideo_Te
Je Suis Charlie
- Mar 2, 2013
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There are way too many people in this thread with far better qualifications than I to decide what is and isn't proper usage, grammar and spelling.
It used to bug me that people in Boston and New York would use the term "yous" (as in yous guys) for the plural of you until I watched the PBS documentary "The Story of English" by Robert MacNeil (MacNeil Lehrer News Hour fame). Apparently the term yous comes from Ireland and since those cities are where a great many of the Irish settled it probably entered into American english usage from there.
So nowadays when I hear people use the term "axe" when they mean "ask" I wonder about the origin rather than getting irritated.
English has become the world's 2nd language by default. But that results in changes to the language as it acquires regional terms that eventually become common everyday terms. Going "commando" derives from the term used by the Afrikaaners to describe their hit and run tactics against the British during the Boer Wars. The term itself derives from Dutch, Spanish and originally Latin.
So we have a living language and I am cool with that. It beats a dead language.
I'm very familiar with youse from growing up in Philadelphia (area). The perception issue comes in with the fact that it's associated with the lower classes -- which is what we Irish were upon arrival.
Now I have a friend from New York who insists that Pennsylvanians have another you-plural term which is "yuns" (for "you ones"). I explain to her that that's western Pennsylvania, which as far as we're concerned is another state with another language. I drop both of them and use y'all from my Southern relatives as the most workable. We do after all have the deficiency of lacking a proper word singularly for you-plural. The beginning of the end on that was when we dropped the familiar thou and made formal you do double (triple) duty. That breeds chaos.
The terms will just have to fight it out until a winner emerges but for me the best candidate is y'all. Provided it's not used as a singular.
Related to yuns though, here in Appalachia I came across the contraction your'n (yours, that which belongs to you, from "your one").
"'At car's same color as your'n" my mechanic said.
Looking into derivations though, it turns out your'n has been around longer than yours (Middle English, 2nd half of the 14th century). Which begs the question of which one's "wrong".
Speaking for myself only the answer is "none of the above". If the terminology is understood by those using it then it is an acceptable means of communication. Only if it isn't comprehensible to others does it become an issue.
The ambiguity of the plural you is probably behind all of these regional derivations. The problem only arises if someone uses a regional term on the interwebs and that results in a miscommunication.
However I see the internet as becoming the arbiter of what is and isn't acceptable terminology and usage. If we coined a new term to describe the evolution of the language on the internet, say Intelish or Englinet, and it was picked up and entered into general usage then that to me would be just fine.
An example of this is the slang term "interwebs" that I used it earlier. It originated as a disparaging term to describe those who were ignorant of the internet but has now become common enough that everyone reading it knows what it means.