Because if I'm going to have nightmares you need to... too!
Anywho...
I AM SO EXCITED FOR SPRING!
Aside from the obvious reasons of yay sun, and yay wedding coming up, and yay experiencing warmth and overall happiness. I am excited for my tulips... and my soon to bloom ability to tiptoe through them.
Tulips are in the purple pot with the towel
draped over the top. Gotta keep them safe!
Last fall, as the winter winds began to creep through the trees and found their ways to JR P.I.'s and my porch, I planted some happy little tulip bulbs (what color, I'm not sure, because... it's me). I had determined that I was going to do my green-thumbed grandmothers proud and grow tulips.
So JR and I went to the Home Depot... or maybe we bought them from Burpee, but needless to say we bought some tulip bulbs and some garlic (this one definitely came from burpee), and we began planting for our spring crops.
We're going to ignore the fact that the garlic died in the throws of winter, because of all the damn snow, and instead revel in the the fact for some bizarre reason, they survived, because
through all the snow, the unthinkable happened, they started to sprout.
And now I have happy little tulips "popping out of the snow, like daisies!" If you can name that quote you get a high-five!
I've been tending them with a gentle touch and plenty of water (most of it snow based). Hopefully in a few weeks, these tender plants will produce gorgeous flowers... hopefully. I am so, so, so excited that I can barely stand it, to get back into the "garden" again. I use the term loosely, because my garden is a series of pots and planters, but I am still really excited to see what we'll be able to grow and eat this year.
I've got high hopes for our batch of pea plants that we started from seeds, as well as, a bunch of lettuce that started as seeds too. The radish sprouts died quicker than I could say, "Oh my gosh! Yes! Radish plants!" So... yeah, but we've got a couple of hybrid on deck corn sprout-lings still going and a few carrot seedlings. I'll bring those around to you next post!
Tasty, Tasty Pineberries
Happy, Happy Chives
And on another, happy note, I had a whole heaping of chives that actually over-wintered, so that's ober exciting. They've actually already started to really hit their growth spurt. And, I have gotten a new pineberry plant to replace the one that I killed this winter as well, so soon I shall have delicious pineberries to snack upon.
Once upon a time, a young, beautiful Texan who had a laugh like sunshine
and hair that dazzled over miles and miles (this is me), learned, what
one day would become her favorite word. Ya'll.
Being from the
middle of nowhere Texas this lovely little Texan grew and flourished and
used ya'll for the entirety of her existence. She wrote it on note
books, she wrote it in papers, she wrote it on book covers,
trapper-keepers, her hands, arms and pants. She wrote ya'll everywhere.
Until
one day, when this gorgeous, effervescent Texan went to college in the
northern south, or what she calls Washington, DC. In one of her first
papers, she wrote the word ya'll and some crass and ugly teacher marked
her down in points for it. She may or may not have used ya'll over 30
times in this personal essay and may or may not have gotten a C because
of ya'll.
But it wasn't the word that the teacher frowned so
deeply and rudely upon. It was the lovely Texan's spelling (I eventually
wrote an essay discussing why ya'll is acceptable and for
which the teacher gave me full marks for and fixed my previous grade).
You see a bunch of nutty English people all the way over on the opposite
side of the world wrote this dictionary that you might have heard of,
the Oxford English Dictionary, and they decided that based on what they
thought the contraction was used for was You and All or You-all or
Y'all. These English loonies thought that they had the answer. And maybe
they did... but they didn't. Webster, that sorry S.O.B. soon followed suit. And before the southerners even knew what was happening, their word had been wordjacked.
See, because the root of the word ya'll is not you all at all!
It's Ya-all.
See,
down in the backwards south where this lovely Texan was raised and
where her parents and teachers and family members, and friends grew up -
they don't much care for the grammar, diction and syntax of those fancy
northerners or those bizarr-o English folk. Case in point Boomer from King of the Hill.
Down
in the deep south where A's become O's and E's become A's, they dont
much care for that fancy quick pronunciation of those northern ninnies
(not saying any of you lovely people are one, but they just dont give
two shits in a bucket).
Time slows down in the south. Words slow
down in the south. And all this slowing down means that words that once
meant one thing now mean another thing. There are many origin stories
for ya'll but what I postulate actually happened is the hybridization of
the Scots-Irish and the Slaves at the time.
Ya'll wasn't popularized until after the words Ye, thee, thou, etc... fell out of favor. So hear me out.
If
time is slowed down in the south, that means that ""ye" in the 18th and
19th centuries was probably still in use in the southern United States,
due to heavy use of family bibles in the area (think about it, where do
we hear those phrases now? Only in the Bible), which leads me to
believe that there were people out there in boondock country using the
frame Ye-all, which over time and use, became the southernized version
Ya-all, which when contracted into the phrase Ya'll.
This
explains why for the better part of the 20th century great American
SOUTHERN authors (remember ya'll comes from the south) were using the
word Ya'll instead of Y'all. It makes no sense why a group of people
would contract You-All instead of Ya-all, when they like drawing out
words SOOOO much they've found a way to make well, sprite, rats, etc...
two syllable words. The only logical reason for them to create a
contraction for a word, would be if that word has two of the same
letters back to back - case in point Ya-All. The A at the end of YA and
the A at the beginning of All join together when you say those two
words.
So the delineation of the word Ya'll HAS to come from the contraction for Ya-all.
Here's my further argument.
At
the point in time that this word was becoming popularized as a
colloquial term, the majority of people in the southern United States
could not read or write. Think about it. My great-great grandparents
signed Xs on all of their documents and theirs before that, unless we're
talking about the group that may or may not have owned people... So
it's my fervent belief that when this word was finally put onto paper it
was put on paper by southerners who understood where the word came from
see - William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Carson McCullers, which
is why when they spelled it in their novels and writings they used the
original word Ya'll.
However, the confusion comes when people
from outside the region attempt to construct a reasoning for why the
word exists, which is where the terminology y'all comes from. And here's
my reasoning for this conclusion. Whenever people try to box in phrases
from another group in society, they often get the word wrong. Case in
point any family that came through Ellis Island and had their names
changed by people who didn't understand the language they spoke.
It's
with this belief in mind that the majority of people outside the region
who began to pick up the word ya'll as it slowly spread, began trying
to put a definition to the word. These people being of sound body and
mind and having never experienced the south in all its radiant splendor
assumed that it had to be a contraction for you-all, and I can see where
that assumption might come from. It is of reasonable assumption that
the majority of people that first were introduced to the word heard it
before they read it, which means that they learned it through oral
tradition, but without the back story, so while they knew that it was
the culmination of a term that meant a group of people, they were not
aware of the history.
This fact leads me to believe that the
word Y'all is a construct created when oral tradition was no longer the
norm in the evolution of the southern-english language. And it's of this
belief that leads me to posture that without written language this
argument of Ya'll vs Y'all would not exist.
This furthers the
belief that y'all is sincerely an evolution of the term ya'll as it is
defined in a living language. Here is where the word y'all vs ya'll
comes to play and here is why the fight is still raging. The fight is
based in the historical culture of the south and all the words and
terminologies that have come from it vs the modernization of this
culture.
You will find that the people that use the term y'all
instead of ya'll will be better educated or not from the region from
whence this term came. The people that use the term ya'll instead of
y'all will have roots that are firmly grounded in the southern culture
and typically use this word on a normal basis. And the people that use
these two terms interchangeably are more than like descendants of the
south who have gone on to get higher education or have moved from the
region and are struggling with the dichotomy of upholding one's heritage
as southerners are apt to do vs growing in the modern culture of
today.
It's with these facts in hand that I say that both are
proper terms for the word. Y'all is acceptable and so is ya'll. These
words are a piece of the continuing evolution of our language as it
changes generation to generation and I think that it is definitely
plausible that this battle between a simple placement of an apostrophe
will continue to be fought for the next century. As the strong southern
roots begin to fade, so will the word ya'll, and the backstory and the
history of how this term came to be will fade as well, but as long as
there are people you use the word y'all, the legacy will continue to
thrive.
But here is the point of this entire rambling - Ya'll is
the original spelling of the word, and will be until the end of time.
Y'all is the modern evolution of the word and is considered the proper
spelling by people who dictate spelling structures, but it is only
because the people who put it in their dictionaries did not know how to
spell it properly or the definition and origin of the word in the first
place.
So you can spell it however you would like to, but when
someone insists that it's spelled y'all because it's a contraction of
you-all, you now have the truth. No. It's spelled y'all because someone
with a dictionary spelled it that way. Either way you toss it, y'all is a
contraction for ya-all and you can spell it any way you G-damn please,
because in the south, that's how we do things.
