"yeah"

[Mark Mandel]

Parliamentary procedure. OED under "yea, adv. (n.)":
    2. An affirmative vote; a person who votes in the affirmative: usually
pl., opposed to nays (or noes).
  Still in use in the U.S. Congress. Cf. AYE.

m a m

On 10/17/07, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Isn't "nay" a borrowing from the Danish dialect of Old Norse? "Nay(,
> Jim)" in place of "no" or "naw" in the Saint Louis of my youth, but I
> doubt that the history of its use is any more interesting than the
> history of "it matters not," always used in place of "it doesn't
> matter" or "I don't care." My WAG is that both usages stem from movies
> and stories about the days of knights.
>

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