Etymology of using ya instead of you - slang 9 I have noticed that some people in parts of Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio often say "ya" instead of "you"? As in "Didya do your homework?" instead of "Did you do your homework?" Does anyone know the etymology behind this pronunciation? I am wondering if this could be evidence of the influence of a large population of people that still speak
Yall or yall? - English Language Usage Stack Exchange If anything, isn't ya'll a contraction of you will (where you is written as ya, as in "ya know")? Otherwise, the only explanation I can come up with for why someone would ever spell it ya'll is through (mistaken) analogy with contractions like I'll, he'll, etc
punctuation - Should ya have an apostrophe? Doin? Etc - English . . . In "ya", the "ou" vowel has been replaced with "a" We don't have punctuation to indicate that, so we just write it This is also generally the case where a replacement slang informal word is missing letters, but others have changed When this happens, we usually just transcribe the sounds rather than using an apostrophe
What is “Who are ya?” and whence it came? “Who are ya?” seems a popular chant or taunt with English football fans, both on and off the stands Is it a fair assessment that it means to diminish the opposition as unknown and insignificant?
Is yay or nay an acceptable alternative to yea or nay? Is "yay or nay" an acceptable alternative to "yea or nay"? I have seen it several times in recent weeks, enough to make me wonder whether it is an emerging usage or just a common typo
When is it appropriate to use see you later? When my girlfriend says "good night" (when sleeping in the same bed) I usually say "see ya" and she just laughs like it doesn't make sense Oh whale, say what you want when you want
What is the origin of the phrase Top of the morning to you? The phrase is Irish in origin but now very rarely used in Ireland (except as a sterotypical "Irishism") It simply means "the best of the morning to you" - perhaps from the idea of unhomogenised milk, where the cream rises to the top An appropriate response might be a simple "thank you" although the traditional response would be "And the rest of the day to yourself " Terrible attempts at
Idiom: Origin of the phrase a bit how ya going to mean . . . - slang 2 The phrase refers to the social class of the speaker, as in 'How ya goin' is originally something a lower or working class person would say in post WW I Australia So it means dodgy or unsure of the reliability However it has become nonsensical because the phrase 'how's it going?' has run around the world like a bushfire since the 1970's
What does gotcha mean? - English Language Usage Stack Exchange Gotcha actually has several meanings All of them can be derived from the phrase of which this is a phonetic spelling, namely " [I have] got you" Literally, from the sense of got = "caught, obtained", it means "I've caught you" As in, you were falling, and I caught you, or you were running, and I grabbed you It's a short step from the benign type of caught to the red-handed type of caught