Y'all in America

Any good Southerner will tell you that there are two kinds of people in the United States, and I'm the other kind. A Yankee. In fact, I was born in the undisputed capital of Yankeeland: Boston, Massachusetts. We were the start of it all-just ask any Bostonian-and with that view of ourselves has come the self-appointed responsibility to keep this country on the right track.

Nowhere does that attitude display itself more strongly than in our defense of Standard American English. If you want to really rankle an oldtimer up North, just casually throw the word "ain't" into a conversation while you're walking down Beacon Street. And pity the poor visitor to Boston Commons who ends a sentence with a preposition. But nothing more represents an affront to all that the good people of Boston are trying so hard to accomplish than the infestation of"y'all" in America.

Let's face it, "y'all" is the quintessential Southern pronoun. To Bostonians it calls up dreaded and disturbing images. If you want to clear out a crowded theater in Brookline, don't yell "fire," you will only provoke a town meeting. But yell "Hey, y'all! What time's the show start at?" and watch them scamper. Such was the linguistic atmosphere of my youth and the standard that I bore to the day that I moved to New Orleans.

Now, my wife was born and raised in Chicago, but, to my indignation, the moment she crossed the Ohio she immediately started using the word "y'all" with enthusiastic abundance. "What y'all doing? Where y'all going? Okay, well, we'll see y'all there!" She chimed the word on the phone, in people's houses, and even in public places. I could understand if she had been using the term to put the locals more at ease with her Northern ways, but she actually seemed to enjoy using it.

Then one day a group of us had just finished dinner in the French Quarter, and we were trying to figure out where we were going next. One couple had not voiced an opinion, so I turned to them, asking, "And what do you want to do?" There was an all-too-familiar moment of indecision where it was not clear whom I meant. They just looked back blankly "Me?" the poor man asked, "or . . "

"Oh, well," I stumbled, gesturing, "both of you. What do you, that is, you and she, want to do? The two of you."

At that moment the beauty of the word "y'all" struck me. My Standard American English upbringing simply had not equipped me with a specific word with which I could address more than one person directly. It always had to be: "the two of you," "all of you people," or some other clumsy phrase. But here was a word that solved that problem. A contraction of "you" and "all," it blends beautifully into conversation. "Y'all" encompasses and unifies while "you" categorizes and dissects, even divides and confuses the addressees. I hated to say it, but I was forced to admit that "y'all"-far from being a product of ignorance and rebel spite-is actually an advancement within the set of English language pronouns.

Five years later, "y'all" flows out of me as if I had been brought up with it. I still raise a few eyebrows when I visit my family in suburban Boston, but they are getting used to it. I even think my mother has used it once or twice, although she might have been making fun of me. With Northerners sometimes you can't tell. But then again I might just be able to persuade them if I explain the advantages and economies inherent in using the second person pluraleven if it wasn't invented in Cambridge.

Bostonian Douglas Patton now lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

Copyright Southern Progress Corporation Mar 1999
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