Dragaera

lazy pronunciation

J A 'Dusty' Sayers dusty at sayersnet.com
Sun Feb 6 10:44:42 PST 2005

MedCat7 at aol.com wrote:

>In a message dated 2/4/2005 9:37:27 PM Eastern Standard Time, "Howard Brazee" <howard at brazee.net> writes:
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>>What does "youz" mean?   It seems to be a New York thing, and I assumed it
>>meant "you" in the singular, but may be wrong.
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>I took it to mean "young ones" or some other from pertaing to "young." To kid around, my fmily will say "yungyins" (meant to sound like onions with a "g").
>-C
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That reminds me of a friend (more my father's friend than mine, really)
who move up here (Upper East Tennessee) from Louisiana (where apparently
the Cajuns have an accent, but  not a Southern Appalachian accent).  At
one point his family came to visit, and, passing through Carter County,
saw a great mass of police and other folks out, so they stopped to ask
what was wrong.  The truth of the matter was that some young kid had
gone hiking or otherwise gotten lost in the woods (he was later
found--apparently some mountain man had found him and taken care of
him), and, at the time, no-one knew where he was.  It was a big deal
locally in 1983 or so.  This was summarised for my friend and his parents as

'We're lookin' for a young'n.'

Our well-meaning Cajuns asked the officer of the law to repeat this,
and, with exasperation he said

'We're lookin' for a YOUNG'N.'

The best they could make out was that he was, in fact, looking for an
onion, which seemed like a lot of trouble for such a large search
party.  Happily, our protagonists (who had actually just brought some
fresh produce up from the bayou) did not compound the problem (as they
initially meant to) by saying they had plenty in the trunk, and would
gladly share.


Also, as a Southerner, I, at least (and all of my friends) only use
'y'all' for second person plural, and generally assume anyone who uses
it for a singular second person must be a Yankee who is trying to sound
Southern but doesn't really know how.  I'll concede that in other parts
of the South, however, some Southerners may misuse the contraction, so
your experience may be different from my own.

-- 
J A Dusty Sayers


'If it be a sin to covet honour, I am the most offending soul alive.'
     --William Shakespeare, Henry V