"Yay long"

[W Brewer]

RE: yea ~ yay.  I am guessing that the KJV "Yea, though I walk through the
Valley of the Shadow of Death" is not <Yay!> 'Hurrah!', but <Yea!> 'truly,
indeed'; and that the earlier meaning of {I caught a fish that was yay
big.} meant 'really big', but gets bleached to (ya gotta look at my hands)
'this big'.
Then I got to thinkin', what about <knee high to a grasshopper>? In my
student days, I had hypothesized that <knee> was a relic from Anglo-Saxon
<ne:ah>  'near' (Old English {ne:ah ~ ny: ~ ni:ehsta} > {*nea ~ nigh ~
next} > {near ~ nearer ~ nearest}).  "I knew you when you were jist
knee-high to a grasshopper, heh-heh-heh." But when VS throws in
mock-Gaelic-accent, then I shift thought to <nay high to a grasshopper>
'not as tall as a grasshopper'.

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