Date:  Tue, 10 May 1994 08:13:05 EDT

From:  Wayne Glowka <wglowka[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MAIL.GAC.PEACHNET.EDU>

Subject: Re: y'all



I'll not enter the singular/plural discussion. There are too many people

from too many places trying to use "y'all." But it sure was difficult to

avoid using y'all when I lived up north for about five years. In-grained

habits are hard to break, but I got very tired of giggles and jokes about

whether or not I wore shoes. I also got tired of hearing a parody

"you-all" drawled with Mid-Atlantic vowels. Moving to Georgia allowed me

to speak Texican again without the giggles.



An interesting class activity is to ask students to spell "y'all." Not

many of my students can get the apostrophe in the right place. With lower

level students, you can also throw in "don't," "doesn't," and "won't,"

forms which normally come out in many freshman papers as "do'nt,"

"dose'nt," and "wo'nt." Greta Little has a nice exercise that requires

students to go around town looking for apostrophes in order to write

"rules" to describe how signmakers actually use apostrophes.







Wayne Glowka

Professor of English

Georgia College

Milledgeville, GA 31061

912-453-4222

wglowka[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]mail.gac.peachnet.edu