 Y'all. It’s a contraction, a very useful one at that.
I grew up in Austin, Texas, and for those of you who don’t know, it’s the hippest place in the south (By hip, I mean cool, and there are a lot of hippies as well…). It’s known as the “Live Music Capitol of the World”, and happens to be one of the few blue counties in Texas. Austin has very little typical “Texas” in it, even though it also happens to be the capitol. Anyway, enough history, I’ll get to my point. One thing that Austin does share with Texas, (besides geography) is the use of ‘y’all’.
It’s a contraction that I will defend until my death. I’ll give you ‘ain’t’. ‘Ain’t’ is stupid. It’s not real English, and there is already a word that serves its function perfectly (isn’t). But ‘y’all’ is proper English. It really is. It’s a contraction of ‘you’ and ‘all’. Who says ‘you all’ anyway? You sound like a fucking square. ‘Y’all’ fills the void that English verb conjugation cannot. There is no plural ‘you’ conjugation. We have the same verb endings for when talking to one person, or talking to 100 people. For example, here is something people say a lot: “Fuck you!” But what if you’re talking to more than one person who needs to be fucked? Do you say “Fuck you two”, or “Fuck all of you”, or worst, “Fuck you all”? No, because that would be silly. So what do you do? Throw a ‘y’all’ in there. Fuck y’all! Bam. English grammar shortcomings fixed!
I write this article, because I currently attend the University of Southern California, which, as you might have guessed, is not in Texas. I get criticized for my use of y’all here, even though I’m one of the furthest things from a hick. So I say, fuck y’all. I’ll keep a little Texas in me, and you can drown in verbal ambiguity.
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