A new one on me y'all guys

[Jonathan Lighter]

My neighbor, age 70+, a lifelong resident of Knoxville, Tenn., clearly and
habitually says "you-all," just as it's printed in older books.

The Wacky article is so clumsily written as to make me fear that at least
some of the "famous author" exx. represent "you will."  (A quick sample of
Faulkner at Google books shows only "y'all.")

JL



On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 1:53 PM, ADSGarson O'Toole <adsgarsonotoole at gmail.com
> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       ADSGarson O'Toole <adsgarsonotoole at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: A new one on me y'all guys
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Garson O'Toole wrote:
> >> Below are excerpts from a book dated 1934 that contains multiple
> >> instances of "ya all" and "ya'll" ...
>
>  Arnold Zwicky wrote:
> > thanks for digging these up, Garson.  i didn't bisbelieve the
> > Wikipedia claims -- just wanted to see some supporting data,
> > which you've been supplying.
>
> Yes, the hypothesis that "ya'll" was constructed by a contraction of
> "ya all" was intriguing. Great thanks for pointing it out, Arnold. I
> was just trying to locate some evidence that might support it.
>
> Also, after I posted the first message with the phrase "close
> proximity" I came across the following webpage based on the book
> "Common Errors in English Usage":
>
> http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/close.html
>
> [Begin excerpt]
> CLOSE PROXIMITY
> CLOSE, IN PROXIMITY TO
> A redundancy: “in proximity to” means “close to.”
> [End excerpt]
>
> To cover up the horrible gaffe I needed to use the phrase "distant
> proximity". HathiTrust allows one to find matches that are distant. So
> "ya all" is on page 74, and "y'all' is on page 271 in "Here are my
> people".
>
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