I've officially finished up my internship! It was a good time but without pay I couldn't stay longer. I successfully got myself some Mayhaw Jelly from a guy with a sign at the end of the driveway. Mayhaw is this weird super regional fruit that is apparently impossible to eat straight up due to bitterness, but people make it into jelly or syrup and eat it like that. It kinda tastes like this lovely mix of raspberry and apple and lemon. It only grows in swampy areas in the south. I'm curious if any of y'all southern hubskiiers have ever had it too or if I'm now the only one of us to have consumed the local rural southern delicacy. No one in Atlanta knows about it even though many people I know are born and raised here, including one guy who prides himself on eating and cooking super locally. So I'm quite pleased I got to find and experience all that. I also got kindly scolded on how I speak and aggressively advertised religion (shoutout to my colleague who declared Christianity as not a religion but a relationship and told me about a church I should seek out in Atlanta and when looking up that pastor he hates LGBTQ+ individuals...). Overall an excellent learning experience and a good glimpse into a very unique way of life, and one I'm glad not to be a part of honestly. That was just too small town for my taste. In other news, I'm officially a published author I think? I helped with grammatical edits in an abstract and because I helped there they added me as an author. So that's being submitted to a conference in a few months through my job and the abstract was accepted. I'm not entirely sure if that means I'm a legit bona fide published author, but I think it does? So that's neat. Y'all smarter than me please correct me if I'm wrong. Also on the spelling of y'all -- y'all or ya'll? I'm preferential to y'all not ya'll as it's a contraction between you and all, but my deep south boss spelled it ya'll. It's apparently a legit argument and I'm curious at to all of your thoughts on this deeply complex and complicated grammatical issue.
Mayhaw jelly is available commercially. It's from Florida, which claims a "centuries old tradition." I've heard of mayhaw, have never had it, but then I've never been outside of Orlando. I have had crabapple jelly (have made crabapple jelly) and I would characterize it, as with most "delicacies", as "thing we don't really want to eat but at one point we were poor and we ate it and now we make auslanders eat it as a ritual to welcome them to our tribe." The proper spelling of "y'all" is "y'all" because it is a contraction of "you all." Your boss is wrong, as the deep south usually is. West Texas used to use "y'all" to address a group of people but since Texas now aligns itself more with the South than the West, Southern appropriation has dominated for at least 30 years. Plural "y'all" dominated as far west as Amarillo in the '90s but east of there, singular "y'all" was king. My personal theory is southerners use "y'all" singularly and "all y'all" plurally much the same way German uses "sie" formally. It is the hillbilly version of the "royal we".
Huh. My extended family's usage is closer to the western usage - "y'all" is for talking to groups and "ALL Y'ALL" is for yelling at groups to shut up and listen. And spelling it 'yall' makes it jarring and weird, which matches the pronunciation.
Growing up, "y'all" as plural was evidence of proper West Plains heritage, while "all y'all" was scornful silliness. I can picture my grandmother scrunching her face and pretending to spit as she discusses it. She also had no patience for the East Texas tendency to repeat everything three times for emphasis. "Male strip show, dance show, male strippers" is very East Texas. Anything worth saying is worth saying once, well, after much deliberation. But then, these are linguistic patterns that diffused westward, not eastward. I think West Texas dialect diffused through New Mexico and Colorado, where it ran into conservative refugees and mormons. meanwhile Southern culture overran it from the east. Dying breed, mine, and unmourned.
Nobody in my direct ancestry has stayed in place long enough for 'proper heritage' of any sort, and any 'West Plains heritage' was copied after WWII. The Native Texan half of the family mostly spoke German until the 1940s and half of them weren't even in Texas until the dust bowl. The culture of my family is mythologized stories about great grand parents glued together with the local stuff wherever they ended up. Even in the branch of the family with the most claim of heritage (Virginian, 'real English') my great grandmother ran away to Montreal for a decade to marry a Catholic and have my granddad.
The "y'all line" of my family moved from Texas to New Mexico in 1940, Alabama to Texas in 1856, Tennessee to Alabama in 1800, the Virginia Colony to the State of Franklin (now Tennessee) in 1787, what became Tennessee from what became Kentucky in 1733, and built this in Virginia in 1758. Prior to that the 'Y'all line" had been in the Virginia Colony since 1650. According to Wikipedia the name was first recorded during the reign of Edward Longshanks.
All of all y'all's opinions on appropriate y'all grammar are making me uncomfortable. Now is "all of all y'all's opinions" referring to all of the opinions, or is it referring to a plural of a plural of a plural?
A Texan has spoken! "Yall" it is (generally, we run low on apostrophes, after all). btw, in case you didn't know, "Texas" is slang for crazy/wild in Norwegian. :)