Regarding Y'all and All Y'all.

Easy way to understand it,

Y'all = the person(s) you are directly speaking to.
All Y'all = Everyone within ear shot.

So, the next time you wanna puff up and act badass to a specific someone(s) make sure you say

"Yeah, but I'll kick Y'all's ass", cause if you say "I'll kick all y'all's ass!" You're gonna be jumped by like 30 people. =P

Having never encountered "ya'll" before, I assumed it was a contraction of "y'all will" as in "Ya'll be in big trouble when Mom gets home!"

my uncle writes it as you'll. I know he means y'all, because he was raised in Denver, but it makes my skin crawl to read it.

Y'all is never singular, though. It's the plural of you, a holdover from older times.

I do enjoy pointing out to people who get grumpy about the misuse of "literally" that language is always evolving, and that it now has an accepted (albeit informal) dictionary definition where it's used for hyperbole. http://www.merriam-webster....http://www.oxforddictionari...

people say that, but i won't accept language "evolving" to where words change their meanings to their literal opposites.

especially, since there's no equivalent for "literal", so.... uh, if people forget the actual meaning, there's NOTHING to replace it.

I totally sympathize, but please don't forget that the phenomenon of words changing their meaning to their opposites happens all the time. In the seventeenth century, "to resent" meant "to appreciate," and around the same time "awful" was used to mean "so glorious it fills me with awe".

though we still have "aweful" for the latter haha

And let's not start on 'cleave', an antonym of itself.

You just made me look that one up. What's really interesting is that cleave (meaning to break part) and cleave (meaning to cling or adhere) were originally two different words with two different origins.

cleave!break comes from: Old English clēofan; related to Old Norse kljūfa, Old High German klioban,Latin glūbere to peel

cleave!cling comes from: Old English cleofian; related to Old High German klebēn to stick

They both ended up being "cleave" because "cleofian" is very close to "clēofan"

In Hamlet and a UK passport, "let" means stop or block, just about anywhere else it means "allow".

One of my pet peeves I didn't see come up in the Twitter convos: "a whole 'nother" instead of "another whole" or "a whole other".

Gotta take it to the HNL...Hole Nother Level!

That's tmesis rather than bad grammar.

Oohh that one makes my head shake!

Thank you! Finally validation of my life long use of y'all instead of ya'll! Y'all just seems more natural, but spellcheck has spent years decimating my self worth over the spelling of this very Southern word that's so dear to my heart. Also, I love the Oxford Comma. I seriously went on a long, meandering, angry diatribe about it when "they" said it was okay to drop the OC a few years ago. My brother in law is an admin on a FB group dedicated to resurrecting dead punctuation marks and older, more elegant grammatical styles.

I had to look up the Oxford comma.

Huh weird they dropped it, i was always taught you HAD to use it before the 'and'.

It's fallen out of use, so they were trying to move with the times, but I was taught that if you pause or would take a breath, you should have a comma. Sometimes modern English is as bad as theoretical math, the rules don't matter or make sense.

I use that rule in all languages and apparently it doesn't work that way in my native Finnish (I *do* remember some of the rules but not nearly all of them). Luckily I got to write my thesis in English.

I honestly don't remember what I was taught regarding commas in elementary school, other than the general "use a comma if you would naturally pause there in the sentence" rule of thumb. Then some English professors in college told me using the comma before the "and" isn't necessary. Later, professors at another university told me it is necessary. I've been very confused about the Oxford comma until I saw the "strippers, JFK, and Stalin" image above.

"They" did not actually drop the Oxford comma. The Oxford University Press is still run by scholars and still insists on it, as well as the Z in "organize". The Oxford University Public Relations Department is run by people with degrees in Marking or Communications, and that tells me everything I need to know about the kind of people that use the Oxford comma vs those that don't.

I'm a science writing editor. With all sincerity, they will have to pry my oxford comma from my cold dead hands.

Y'all is totally correct. The apostrophe indicates where letters have been left out (i.e., where the words have been contracted), and thus "ya'll" makes no damn sense.

OXFORD COMMA FOREVER. My favorite illustration for why it matters: http://stephentall.org/wp-c...

This seems like the most appropriate context to point to Word Crimes: https://www.youtube.com/wat...

Have to say someone in the comments of the Oxford comma thread had a valid point in saying that reordering the words can also make a message clearer (strippers, JFK and Stalin vs JFK, Stalin and strippers), but there's no harm in using an Oxford to make sure everyone's on the same page, either. All about communication, right? :D

Ok, I am bookmarking that video and posting it every time someone's grammar or spelling annoys me.

The ambiguity with Oxford comes from singular. "We invited the stripper, JFK, and Stalin" implies that JFK's profession is stripping, much more honorable than his actual job.

You can actually construct an ambiguous Oxford case for every single ambiguous non-Oxford case. The rule has nothing to do with preventing ambiguity or fostering clarity: it is strictly and only a class marker.

In a sentence like that neither the presence nor the lack of the Oxford comma helps, but there are many instances where an Oxford comma helps in a three item list. Such as when you are listing businesses that you had to go to for errands, especially when the last two where doctors and/or lawyers.

"Y'all" is the second person plural pronoun. I like to think that we here in the South (or ultra-South, in New Orleans) are more linguistically advanced because we have this word. After all, almost all European languages have a second person plural.
And thank you for promoting the proper spelling of this handy little item. An apostrophe indicates a letter or letters that have been deleted. So "you all" is trimmed down to "y'all," not "ya'll."
I'll stop now before ranting about "comprised OF..." - that always makes me get pissy.

Here in Yorkshire, "you" is the second person plural, and "thou" is the second person singular; although "thou" is rapidly becoming archaic.

It seems that this practice is extinct now, but until well into the 20th century at least, Quakers also used "thou" as the second person singular, based on the historical usage of "you" to refer not only to more than one person but also to one's social superior (Shakespeare uses it that way, for one). As I understand it, their reasoning was that we are all equal in God's eyes, so no one was anyone's social superior; and they used "you" to refer to God, so using "you" to refer to a person would be placing them on the same social level as God.

Mm, I always remembered it like the Spanish pronouns. Tu=thou=familiar second person singular, usted=you=formal second person singular (pardon the lack of accents). But I worked at a renaissance faire for over a decade, so we got drilled on when to 'thou' and when to 'you' pretty heavily. I miss Shakespeare :D

I was aware of that practice, but not of the reason. I thought they were just sticklers for "proper English".
Happen Yorkshire folk use it because they don't recognise anyone as their social superior either. :)

Oh! What's up with "comprised of"? Educate me. :)

http://dictionary.reference...
It's partially a tense thing. The library 'comprises' a thousand books today, or it 'comprised' a thousand books last year. 'Comprise should not be used in a passive sense i.e. if it is 'comprised of', then your sentence structure is backwards - many small things 'comprised' a large thing, but a large thing is not 'comprised of' small things.

And now I've confused my darn self :/

Thanks, Jesslin, that was great! My dad set me on to that one. His comparative example was:
The committee is composed of three instructors and seven students.
versus
The committee comprises three instructors and seven students.
"Comprise" sounds so close to "compose," maybe that's why it's confusing.

Two years late, but...

There's nothing at all wrong with 'comprised of.' It's a perfectly standard construction, first attested in the 18th century, increasingly common throughout the 19th, and widely used by many of the most fluent writers in the 20th. The proscription is without merit.

I've seen different justifications for refusing 'comprised of.' Most commonly, people seem to focus on the availability of 'composed of' as an alternative - but I disagree that this is the root of the issue ('don't use it because synonyms exist' is not a robust argument). My hypothesis is that the proscription was originally proposed because the active voice can be used with an identical meaning to the passive: 'A panel comprised of 6 judges' = 'A panel comprising 6 judges.' In this sense the passive is admittedly unnecessary, but it is not ungrammatical or non-standard.

I'm trying to think of another verb which follows a similar pattern. 'Rate' might be one such: 'Warmth did not rate as a necessity' = 'Warmth was not rated as a necessity', and 'It rates highly in reviews' = 'It is highly rated in reviews.' Can't think of more offhand... I'm certain there will be others, though.

Of course, if you hate it, don't use it. There are language uses that just 'feel wrong' to me, and usually that's a pretty safe guide to whether the usage is standard or not... but in more than one instance I've been shown to be wrong. I still tend to avoid those constructions, and they still grate on my nerves.

The y'all vs ya'll thing is regional. Anyone from a region that uses the "ya'll" spelling variant will tell you that it's short for "ya all". I was born and raised in a "y'all" area but have lived in a "ya'll" place for over 20 years now.

While the "ya'll" form is less common to see, it's not wrong. The "ya'll" form has been used in Southern newspapers since at least the late 1700's, and it was used on billboards in Georgia during the 1996 Olympics. I've read that the "y'all" form was first used in Northern newspapers as a derisive reference to Southerners.

I think the fact that both Falkner and Hemingway used "ya'll" in their writing lends further legitimacy to the form.

We use Y'all as "you all", not ya all in upstate South Carolina.

and had to edit because spellcheck corrected it to ya'll.

Huh! Never heard that one before. I'd just assumed people didn't understand how to use apostrophes. Thanks. :)

The problem I have is in the pronunciation. Y'all is "y ** all" with the ** as a glottal stop. Applying the same idea to ya'll would make it sound like "yah ** ll" or "yowl".

Personally I tend to use y'all for a casual pluralization ("have a good night y'all") and all y'all for emphasis ("fuck all y'all, I'm out").

Regarding alot: http://hyperboleandahalf.bl...

Love that one. A lot sans space (can't bring myself to write it), plus a couple other common and annoying mistakes, are actually flagged as profanity and censored on the forums of the browser game Kingdom of Loathing. You also have to pass a literacy test before being allowed into the in-game chat system. It's surprisingly effective at keeping chat readable.

Now, see, this sounds like a browser game I could seriously get into.

Argh! "Should of!" Reading that almost causes me physical pain, even when I know it's only being used as a joke...

especially since it makes absolutely no sense, if they just looked at what they just wrote for a second.

'Bored of' is my big one. It's 'bored with'!

tbh i'm more interested in the difference in language of all lower case abbr internet initialisms. also ppl who differentiate between "figuratively" and "literally" literally make me die; nothing kicks the legs out of a statement than to say "this hyperbole figuratively does this extreme thing." the only ironic bad grammar i enjoy is "irregardless," bc of gretchen wieners; otherwise ironic use of bad grammar/unsolicited proofreading is just smirking pretentiousness from the single-advanced kids who only know slightly more grammar rules than some, and there's some academic classism in there too, ignoring content for rule-following. lol imo

Irregardless is my favorite as well!

I thinks youse, all am to sensative. Wurdz iz wurdz. Like Ima fixin two literally bust a gut at all's ya'll's mustakes in this too pairofgraphs.
-----------------------------------------

*looks around* Did I succinctly encompass a sufficient degree of colloquial faux pas in that pair of sentences? I covered misspellings, misuse of punctuation, to/too/two, and that is overlooking the auxiliary verbs and their in inappropriate affiliation with the appropriate pronouns or words. Oh, let's not overlook my "fixin to do something"; which, by the way, I being from Texas... as my screen name infers (as apposed to implies)... feel is a perfectly acceptable term to use (except when it isn't).

Your use of "youse" and "ya'll" blocked you from include a 'your / you're' confusion.