I am evidently completely and hopelessly at one with my regional dialect and usage, some of which I never knew there was any other way of saying; I am far more provincial than I had imagined.
But even within my local area, there is some significant variation. I was listening to a woman speak at a meeting the other night and instantly recognized that she did not have a South Jersey accent; I was guessing she was from the other side of the river, and specifically either South Philly or Mayfair. (Despite being almost on opposite ends of Philadelphia, there is a lot of overlap between how those neighborhoods sound.) After the event, I asked her where she was from, and she named a nearby town in South Jersey. "No, I mean where are you from originally," I said, "because it's not South Jersey." She looked a little surprised, and said, "Well, I lived in South Philly until I was 10." Bingo.
Everybody around me says most of those words differently than I do. Maybe it's because I live in the SF Bay Area.
For example; I would say, "Lot's of Luck to you" and most people around here say, "Rotsa Ruck" and things like, "It wasn't my fart" instead of "It wasn't my fault" when they hit you with their cars.
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
Jim and I have spoken on the phone, trust him on this one.....
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
Slang contraction for the 2nd person plural pronoun, utilized amongst the indigenous populations of the southern continental United States.
Origin: Often incorrectly attributed to the contraction of "you + all," the word actually originated from the fusing of "ya + all." The kind of fella who would say ya'll for the first time would not be enunciating a clean and crisp "you" in his daily speech. "You" wasn't in his spoken vocabulary, but "ya" was. Now, try to say "ya all." It is actually not easy to do as two separate words. To say it with a normal cadence, it already almost sounds like ya'll, but with the slightest stutter. "Ya all" quite naturally slips into the familiar pronoun we all use. Ya + all = ya'll. When you look at it that way, the placement of the apostrophe after the "a" makes sense. Alternately, you + all = y'all. However, the ya + all transition more naturally illustrates the origin of "ya'll." "You all" is cumbersome, although that is usually how yall is explained to uninitiated Yankees, whose experience with "ya" is often limited. "You all" just doesn't lead the the inevitable ya'll that "Ya all" does.
I coulda wrote my own explanation but this was handy...
Sometimes it seems as though one has to cross the line just to figger out where it is
