"you pays your money"

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Aug 15, 2007, at 11:12 AM, Larry Horn wrote:

> I've always heard this

heard?  or seen?  isn't the "yer" spelling just a representation of
unaccented "your"?  or is it supposed to represent [j@] i

> 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.

i've heard it with "and" joining the two clauses, and with
"chances" (as in scot's original query) rather than "choice".  lots
of googleable examples of all these variants.

is the interpretation really conditional?

arnold

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