Re: [Leica] Re: Let's move on ?

[Guy Bennett <guybnt@idt.net>]

>At 10:06 AM 6/13/99 -0700, Guy Bennett wrote:
>>
>>did you hear ['you all' could be seen as having a slightly pejorative
>>resonance in this context]
>
>Excuse me?  "Y'all" is the Southern English dialect second person plural
>pronoun.  Until early modern times, English used "you" for second person
>plural (more than one) and "thee" for second person singular (one).
>"Thee", "thy", and "thine" fell out of use in the 1600's, though most of us
>still understand the useage.  American southerners, being a cut above in
>linguistic precision, began using "y'all" to separate plural and singular.
>
>Perfectly good English and hardly perjorative in any sense.
>
>Marc


marc,

this may be true in the south(east), but is not in the southwest, where i
live, nor, i suspect, in other parts of the country where it may well have,
as it does here, distinctly regional overtones that are of the type hunted
out by the pc police (of whom my post was intended to be a mild parody) as
bearing potential regional/racial/socio-economic stereotypes. many of my
relatives, italian immigrants having lived in new york and new jersey
before coming to the west coast, said 'youse' (and frequently added 'guys'
in much the same way that i've heard the appended 'y'all two', for example)
for second person plural, and though this was certainly standard for them
and the others living in similar immigrant communities (i can't attest to
its usage outside of such communities), it certainly smacks of east-coast,
1930s mobster-type english to my latter-20th century west coast ears (hope
i'm not offending any of youse guys out there, if so, my apologies). this
may well be the result of my limited knowledge of english dialect usage,
though i suspect it is more an issue of the possibly unconscious media
conditionning we receive with respect to english usages of all types, many
of which, like it or not, have come to be stereotypically associated - and
not necessarily with the appropriate connotations, but then again, this is
the nature of stereotypes - with certain segments of the population.

guy