The Exception for Y’all

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi, who’s this?

I’m Alan from beautiful Austin, Texas.

Beautiful Austin, Texas, indeed.

Welcome to the show.

How are you guys doing?

All right.

What can we help with today?

Here in Texas, we have several slang words. One of them where we abbreviate you all. And several of my friends and I have an urge to abbreviate it Y-A apostrophe L-L. And I understand that, like, grammatically, this seems incorrect, but still, I don’t know why I have this urge. And sometimes it gets corrected and sometimes it doesn’t, depending on the computer medium that I’m using.

So you’re a little bothered by the fact that your instinct says one thing, but good style says something else.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

I’m wondering if there’s two ways to abbreviate it, maybe, or if it’s even a word at all.

Yeah, I find myself getting corrected all the time when I type it on my iPhone.

Do you have an iPhone?

Yes, ma’am.

Yeah, that’s exactly where it starts correcting it. But then I put it on Gmail, and it doesn’t correct it.

Oh, interesting.

The LL is fine.

Interesting.

Yeah, I wonder why you have this urge to put the apostrophe before the LL. There’s a theory, and Brian Garner, who we talk about on the show all the time, he actually lives in Texas and is a great language expert. His theory is, and I love it, is that we’re trying to make it match other contractions, like heel and sheel and weel, like weel go to the store, or heel be here soon, or sheel be back. And that is like apostrophe LL at the end. And maybe that’s what we’re trying to do with y’all.

That makes sense.

Yeah.

And there’s more contractions like that in English. But I think Martha and I are in agreement on this. The apostrophe should be after the Y. You’re abbreviating the word Y-O-U. The apostrophe takes the place of the O-U. So it’s Y apostrophe A-L-L rather than Y-A apostrophe L-L.

Okay.

But yeah, I want to because I’m thinking of words like shill and will.

I think that’s it.

Yeah.

And I think that’s a fair instinct. I mean, unfortunately, it’s a misleading instinct, but I think that’s a pretty logical thing. And one of the ways that English kind of misleads us is that the patterns don’t always hold true. And, Alan, your friends do this as well. Your friends do what you do.

Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly right. We all kind of share the same instinct. And then at some point, because we’ve had iPhones for a while, and then at some point they just started auto-correcting it to put the apostrophe after the Y when they didn’t at first. And then, like I said, in other mediums, it still doesn’t.

Yeah, they might have updated the dictionary on the later versions of the iOS. This dialect word, by the way, is common throughout the South. You probably know that it’s not just from Texas. But the spelling that you want to use, the Y-A apostrophe L-L, shows up about 10% of the time when we look at texts of casual speech. So you’re not alone in that. But you’re a minority. You’re a minority. If you are writing a formal document, you’re probably avoiding y’all altogether anyway. But if it is okay to use it, you should spell it with the apostrophe right after the Y.

Okay.

Awesome.

Cool.

Thanks for calling.

Much appreciated.

Yeah.

Hey, I appreciate it. Love your show.

Take care now.

Thanks, Alan.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

You have y’all as in a part of your dialect, right?

I sure do. In fact, I was going to tell you that if you’ve ever driven out of Cincinnati into northern Kentucky, there’s this giant water tower that says Florence Y’all on it. Have you ever been there?

What does that mean?

Well, it used to be the Florence Mall. But because the water tower is this civic structure, they couldn’t have the advertising. There were other legal problems. So instead of just taking off all the lettering, they just changed Florence Mall to Florence Y’all.

So Y apostrophe A-L-L?

Yeah, it’s spelled that way.

Just meaning Florence Y’all, like y’all come now?

Yeah, yeah. And there’s a mall now at the foot of it.

That is very odd.

This is outside Cincinnati?

Yes, yes, northern Kentucky.

Okay, right.

Right on the edge of that dialect region, actually, right?

Right, exactly. It’s kind of like welcome to the southerner way of speaking.

That’s right. It’s a monument to a dialect.

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