Spare Change

Forget the dictionary, the only proper spelling is y'all.

Y'all know what I mean?

Hmmm, I've always used ya'll.

Ya'll is better.

Y'all is a contraction for you all. The apostrophe is supposed to go where the missing letters would be. Therefore: y'all.

Ya'll implies that the first part of the contraction starts with ya -- it doesn't.

And yes, I'm being grumpy. I'm allowed. So y'all hush.

Warren,

Yours is the argument I was prepared to make until I read the dictionary. I suppose the dictionary can be wrong, as it has made other incorrect accomodations before, accounting for the sloppiness of evolving American speech.

Perhaps it's time to take a stand...

Ya'll don't have to be so grumpy about it.

Interesting discussion. I found this little page looking for the definitive answer to just this exact question...ya'll or y'all? I've always seen ya'll in North Carolina written by everybody, so when a transplanted Yankee friend wrote y'all in an email to me I was ready to call him a stupid yankee for abusing our word. Of course, y'all does make sense from the a contraction standpoint, so I took a quick look online to see what other self-respecting southerners thought. Most folks who care to argue about it seem to take the grammatical high ground and insist y'all is correct and ya'll is an error. Despite seeing the logic in this, I'm hesistant to give up the ya'll because it kinda conveys the proper pronunciation of the word. The fact that this version is so widespread in the south means that it's not a mispelling but instead represents a variation in what is considered to be correct. Hell, when Americans started spelling the British "analyse" as "analyze" it was probably considered incorrect by the Brits, but it's now considered as correct by us. So for me it boils down to who had ownership of the word. If southerners started writing this word as ya'll as a convention in our local dialect then ya'll is correct. If this is the case, then in my mind this trumps any desire by people who are so impressed with their amazing understanding of contractions that they choose to correct people who are using a word that is accepted in their respective dialect. I'd like to see some old- school newspapers or other writings from early america to see how it was written before I really figure out which spelling is the bastard version....

My friend and i just had an hour long debate about the use, and we, being really intelligent, have decided that they are both exceptable, but y'all is more widely used, thus being more correct. So john i win!

Elliot may win the "y'all" debate, but he unfortunately comes up on the short side on the "acceptable/exceptable" conflict.

Okay, ya'll. Like Rusty I was looking for the answer to this question when I found this page. I think the 'a' should go with the 'y' as in see ya'. This is the way it is pronounced in the south. It's like when you hear someone not from the south say the words Clempson and Sumpter, it just doesn't sound right. In an 1864 letter from Charleston, SC, Lt. George E. Dixon of the CSS Hunley wrote Ft. Sumpter.

It's definitely y'all. The dictionary also lists "words" like McJob, chick flick, ain't, and cat food. Yup.

THANK YOU WARREN! It's a *contraction*....the apostrophe goes where the missing letters would be!! YOU ALL is the phrase we're contracting, right?? Not YA ALL?!?! I'm just so sick of being accused of being a stupid southerner...I really want us to prove the rest of the country WRONG instead of RIGHT, so can we *please* write "y'all," y'all???

You can't give authority to anything you read in any dictionary. It's just a book filled with words and it lists how folks, the educated and uneducated, use the words. It's not intended to be an authority on the proper usage of the words, not the spelling or the pronunciation. If it was the authority it wouldn't suggest, with the added explanation, that it's okay to pronounce the word nuclear as nukyular! (Another of my pet peaves.) That said coming from someone born, raised and educated in Texas, the word is spelled y'all. What intelligent person would put an apostrophe in the middle of a complete word? The spelling ya'll is inserting the apostrophe into the word all! The word all is not contracted! And, ya know Donna, ya is not a word, it's a slang mispronunciation. Furthermore, y’all is always used to imply more than one person! If y’all can’t understand that, regardless of where you were born, then don’t write down your verbal contractions!

D'Lynne, it may not be one of my pet PEEVES, but it does bother me when people can't spell in discussion threads about the proper spelling of words.

"Nukyular" drives me crazy, too, though.

I've always spelled it "ya'll", from "ya all", because I don't think I've ever met someone who says ya'll but makes a concerted effort to pronounce the word "you" in its entirety. In my experience, if you say "ya'll", you say "ya".

What say y'all to this...

"Darkness falls across the land
The midnight hour is close at hand
Creatures crawl in search of blood
To terrorize y'awl's neighbourhood"

What say y'all to the following?

"Darkness falls across the land
The midnight hour is close at hand
Creatures crawl in search of blood
To terrorize y'awl's neighborhood..."