I hope WE ALL can move on to something else

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

At the risk of soliciting still one more defensive posting in this little 
contretemps, I'll respond briefly to catts22's irritated-sounding ("I don't know 
what 'vocative' means and I don't particularly care to") message below, since 
it appears that he still doesn't understand the basic linguistic issues 
involved. (Also by the way, I'm having a great day and a great week. Life's Good, as 
LG tells us.)

1. The pronominal constructions "we all" and "us all" are NOT dialect 
variants, nor are they, for that matter, common only to the "vernacular"--contrary to 
the implications of cats22's various postings. I find 182,000,000 instances 
of "we all" using a Google search, and 58,000,000 of "us all." One can also 
find "they all," "them all," "the people all," etc. This is the same construction 
that the speaker in the quote was using (she just gave it the wrong case 
marking).

2. The pronominal constructions "we all" and "us all" are not 
paradigmatically related to the pronoun "y'all," which is a dialect form in American English 
in the South and in areas of the North where it has been carried by migration 
(sometimes, yes, persisting for generations in the speech of some persons). 
Contrary, to cats22's belief, "y'all" is a recognized feature of stereotypical 
African-American vernacular (you don't have to be a linguist to know this). 
Southerners and African-Americans do not use "we all" and "us all" any more than 
other Americans do, but they do use "y'all" (basically as the plural of 
"you"). (They even use the pronominal construction "y'all all": 110,000 Google   
hits, as in "Sistahs I don’t know Why Y’all All Still Single Because there are 
Plenty of Good Black Men Out Here, y’all just too picky! ..." <
www.whataboutourdaughters.com/>!)

3. As is well known, people often mistakenly use objective forms of pronouns 
when the subjective form is "correct"--and vice versa. The passage cited in 
cats22's original posting is an example of hypercorrection in which the 
subjective form was substituted for the "correct" objective form. Though I think that 
the most likely explanation for the solecism is hypercorrection, note that the 
constructions *"He wants we all to believe" and "He hopes we all will 
believe" are very close in superficial syntax and could be blended in actual speech. 
At any rate, there is no evidence that Southerners and African-Americans make 
case mistakes any more frequently than do other Americans. Hypercorrected case 
mistakes are not correlated with whether the speaker's rent is subsidized by 
the state (though probably working-class speakers may hypercorrect LESS than 
middle-class speakers).
        A Google search also demonstrates that "want(s) we all to" is not a 
feature of any living person's dialect, regardless of race or location; "want 
we all to" has 13 (mostly foreign and archaic) Google hits; "want us all to" 
yields 447,000. So, ALL people pretty much always say "want(s) us all to"; 
"want(s) we all to" MUST therefore be a slip of the tongue of some sort, and 
nothing more. 
       There is thus no LINGUISTIC evidence in the cited text that the 
speaker was a Southerner or an African-American. 

4. Cats22 writes that catt22 has inferred from context that the speaker was 
African-American. This real-world inference may well be correct--indeed, it is 
in part for just this reason that I inferred that catts22 was obliquely 
interjecting race into catts22's critique. Catts22 replies that, nevertheless, 
catts22 was not referencing race and that no racial put-down was intended, and I am 
grateful for that clarification: "Yo" was merely an attention-getting device 
(now so common among the youth that one forgets it is a major feature of 
hip-hop?), unrelated to the assumed race of the speaker; jocular pejorative 
association of the speaker's "Vern Nackular" solecism with "rent-controlled" folk in 
a putatively African-American housing project is merely accidental; etc. 
Catts22's critique thus merely represents a jocose, Menkenesque, patronizing view 
of the lower classes in general, not Blacks in particular. 

5. The fact that a writer may be male or female does not, by the way, 
determine in my book whether her postings may be brilliant or ridiculous, interesting 
or banal. I thus feel no need to apologize to catts22 for having used generic 
feminine pronouns in my responses to what he wrote on ADS-L (much less for 
not having recognized him as so important a figure on ADS-L that I should have 
known and remembered his gender), any more than that I need to apologize to 
women for creating the counter-to-fact inference that catts22's postings did not 
stem from a man.

In a message dated 814/08 10:53:42 PM, cats22 at frontiernet.net writes:


> 
> Sorry, Ron, if you're having a bad day.
> 1]  The original note, from me, referenced a remark by a bystander at
>     a press conference, in Harlem, by (widely recognized as black)
>     Congressman Charles Rangel. (It's also fairly widely known that a
>     sizable percentage of Harlemites, particularly those who, like the
>     lady quoted, have been there since or before 1994, are black.
>     So while you may not have perceived any 'evidence' that the speaker
>     is black, it should have been fairly obvious, in context.
> 2]  In the year 2008, surprising as it may seem, many of the blacks
>     living in NYC and environs did not " migrated to northern urban areas
>     from the South." Nor did their parents. And in many cases, nor did
>     THEIR parents.
>     A 15-yr-old black young lady who's spent a fair amount of time in my
>     upstate New York home as a Fresh Air Fund child -- a beneficiary of a
>     program enabling urban youth to spend time during the summer in the
>     country -- says y'all frequently. She's never been in the south or even
>     near it, except on a class trip Washington DC last year.
>     Her mother, the accountant for a NYC museum, may occasionally say y'all,
> 
>     but I've heard no one in that family use 'we all' in the way cited in my
> 
>     original note.
> 3]  I don't have a clue what a 'vocative particle' is, nor do I particularly
>     care to. Yo, as used, was an attention-getter (and it sure got yours!!)
>     only incidentally meant in anything vaguely like a 'ghetto' sense. The
>     word may, a few years ago, been "stereotypical of 'ghetto' speech," but
>     -- and I could be wrong -- but I don't think "You All," in any sense
>     (including 'pronominally'), _ever_ was.
> 4]  If you perceive me as being condescending to either Vern Ackular or Les
>     Common, I will apologize to them. I don't think I owe you one.
> 5]  And your suggestion that I was being patronizing or condescending re
>     my rent-subsidized quip about the yellow submarine, please go back and
>     read the earlier post and read that remark in the original context --
>     relative to a congressman who's been widely reported, of late, even in
>     my original note, as hogging three (four, until the NY Times came down
>     hard on him a couple of weeks ago) rent-subsidized apartments that
>     clearly are NOT meant to be held in the hands of people who [1] really
>     can afford fair market rents and [2] as an elected official, really
>     should know better than to milk the system _that_ way.
> 6]  Finally, not to put too fine a point on _YOUR_ "far off the mark" note,
>     I've been around here long enough that _most_ people realize I am male.
>     That you don't, and that you so weirdly misconstrued virtually all the
>     points of my original note (and at least one of my follow-ups) suggests
>     you might read more closely, more often, before you so harshly castigate
>     someone.
> dh (more formally known as Doug Harris) (cats22 to you
> 




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