Who are we versing today?

[Joe Pickett]

Here are two linguistic developments I've noticed among the kids on the North
Shore (north of Boston).


1.  Verse meaning "to play against, take on."

This is a misunderstanding of the preposition versus, which kids have reanalyzed
as a verb.  So "Yankees versus White Sox" means "The Yankees team takes on the
White Sox team."  One of the 7-year-old twin boys next door to us asked his
mother before last Saturday's soccer game, "Who are we versing today?"

This might be dismissed as an isolated mistake, but when we mentioned it to our
11-year old son, who has versed many an opponent in hockey, soccer, and
baseball, he couldn't see what was out of whack.  It seemed a perfectly normal
use of the word to him.

2.  The gainsaying or emphatic "Yah."

I've noticed this a lot among kids.  A Swedish sounding "yah" that replaces the
usually "yeah" (with the vowel of hat) under certain conditions.  It sometimes
is just an emphatic "yeah" but it usually functions as a contradictor to
negative statements, much as "Si" replaces "Oui" in French.  It often is
preceded by (or mixed with)  a snigger or guffaw of dismissal at the
interlocutor's naivete or state of misinformation.

You didn't get an assist on that play, did you?

Yah, I passed it to him right before he scored.