ehhhh I disagree. I definitely cringe when I hear a hipster who's lived here for 2 years try to inject jawn into every conversation. Feels very forced. Also Jawn being put on pins and shirts is also very cringe to me
> when I hear a hipster who's lived here for 2 years try to inject jawn into every conversation. Feels very forced.
Same thing happens with "y'all", even though it's nowhere close to being as esoteric/regional. A couple years ago, Twitter seemed to have become obsessed with incorporating it conspicuously into every other tweet. I didn't even know "y'all" had rules until that happened. (I couldn't really tell you what those rules are, but it was popping up in places that were so syntactically awkward, by people who were clearly not "y'all" natives. So they definitely exist.)
I love ya'll because second person plural is something that English annoying lacks.
I'm also a fan of habitual be because it's something that can be expressed in English, but it sounds verbose or relies on context whereas "I be" is self explanatory without any context -you know that the speakers means "I regularly do/feel ___ "
My favorite phrase puts them together: "ya'll be trippin" is IMO the most efficient way in the English language to tell a group of people that their behavior is unacceptable.
On the one hand "yous" fills this void in a way that is more consistent with the rules of pluralizing words, but on the other hand it also introduces a homophone with "use" which could hypothetically lead to confusion. So which is worse, inconsistency (y'all) or ambiguity (yous)?
Ultimately, since "yous" never fits in the same grammatical slot as "use" (different part of speech), there's never any real chance at confusion anyway. Therefore I weigh in on the side of "yous".
Once again New York has it right and the rest of yous be trippin.
Sentences that end with a y’all still come across as distinctly Southern. Sentences that begin with y’all, on the other hand, sound normal or dare I say even hip. To me that is.
"I definitely cringe" and "Also ... is also ... very cringe to me"
You certainly get plenty of mileage out of the word cringe. Is it a verb, is it an adjective - who knows? Your also ... also construct riffs on "either ... or", "both ... and" and the like. There must be a name for terms like that - you get them in Latin too so they've been around for a while eg nec ... necque (neither ... nor).
Jawn is just a colloquialism but I've seen also ... also several times before now. I've also seen very cringe too.
I am not taking the piss but I feel that I am watching language evolve right in front of me. I suspect that whilst this article and set of threads gets itself all whizzed up over jawn, it is missing the rather bigger point about language and conversations that travel at the speed of light instead of just sound and is distributed by the internet and not just the post office.
On HN we pontificators have an audience that a Roman Imperator could only dream of.
you'd have to be blind and deaf not to notice that gradual downhill slide of popular vocabulary. It may have been said with a bit more grace, but they're not wrong either.
"Gee, 20% of this paragraph is the same word, perhaps it would serve me well to mix it up."
Yeah. I feel like there's two types of people that actually use jawn: those that are very Philly and those that are trying, really, really hard to sound Philly. I can't say I've said jawn with a straight face since I was a little kid.
For Boston/Mass it's "wicked." You can tell when someone injects it naturally and they grew up with its various contexts, or you're a new transplant and it's usually used in every other sentence.
I was the latter circa 2012 but ~8 years in Boston tempered my use, haha.
