"you pays your money"

[Laurence Horn]

At 12:22 PM -0500 8/15/07, Scot LaFaive wrote:
>While watching a Twilight Zone episode today I was struck by Rod Serling's
>use of an ungrammatical form: "you pays your money, you takes your chances."
>I thought this seemed out of the ordinary for him, so to Google I went.
>Interestingly enough, this appears to be idiom of some usage. This person
>claims to have an 1846 citation for it
>(http://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/37/messages/256.html).
>

I've always heard this as "You pays yer money, you takes yer choice".
But the verb (dis)agreement is definitely part of it, along with the
implicit form of the conditional.

LH

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