Entry tags:
Grammar silliness
I had an odd thought today.
Both "you" and "they" get rather slippery with regards to number. That is they can both be singular and plural.
As a side note, next time someone tries to get on your case about using they as a gender neutral pronoun, point out that it goers back to at least the 1400, and it wasn't until the latter half of the 1800s that grammarians started trying to discourage it in favor of using "he" in situations where gender was indeterminate. Which is not that acceptable nowadays.
And you gets interesting as well. Many dialects have have evolved phrases that indicate that a plural you is meant.
What triggered all this was a comment in one of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fayanora's stories with members of a collective (multiple personalities) noting that they couldn't use "they" as a gender neutral pronoun because they used it to refer to the whole collective.
Since they were British, that caused me to free associate to the expression "you lot" which definitely refers to a group. That lead me to the stereotypical "youse" found in parts of the US east coast.
"You all" (also y'all") is rather more complicated and I'm not sure if it's properly used as a singular or plural. "all y'all" is definitely plural though. :-)
Anybody have any other examples?
Isn't grammar *fun*?
Both "you" and "they" get rather slippery with regards to number. That is they can both be singular and plural.
As a side note, next time someone tries to get on your case about using they as a gender neutral pronoun, point out that it goers back to at least the 1400, and it wasn't until the latter half of the 1800s that grammarians started trying to discourage it in favor of using "he" in situations where gender was indeterminate. Which is not that acceptable nowadays.
And you gets interesting as well. Many dialects have have evolved phrases that indicate that a plural you is meant.
What triggered all this was a comment in one of
fayanora's stories with members of a collective (multiple personalities) noting that they couldn't use "they" as a gender neutral pronoun because they used it to refer to the whole collective.Since they were British, that caused me to free associate to the expression "you lot" which definitely refers to a group. That lead me to the stereotypical "youse" found in parts of the US east coast.
"You all" (also y'all") is rather more complicated and I'm not sure if it's properly used as a singular or plural. "all y'all" is definitely plural though. :-)
Anybody have any other examples?
Isn't grammar *fun*?
no subject
IIRC, it's a matter of politeness, an implication of "I know there's only one of you, but in case I miscounted, I want everyone to know this applies ot them, too."
(I spent a portion of my teen years in the south. I remember being confused the first time I heard "y'all" to refer to a single person.)
no subject
But I could be off there.
-Fallon~