Stephanie from “Country Living at It’s Best” wrote a post about “lingo” and her word was “youins.” My word for today is lingo, too. It is a term that is often used in the south but not in the northeast where I am from. The word is “yonder,” as in “over yonder.”
When I was young, we lived in New York State and went to visit my mother’s family every late August in central southern Virginia, a rather rural area. One of my cousins was the same age as my sister and they spent many hours playing together. One day when playing at the cousin’s house, she said to my sister,”Let’s go over yonder.” My sister was thoroughly confused. “Where do you what to go?” she said. “Over yonder.” “Where’s yonder?” replied my sister. She had no idea that it meant “over there, a place farther away that can be seen” as the dictionary puts it. It was a word she had never heard, and truthfully I had never heard nor used either. We all had a good laugh about “yonder” after that.
So each are has it’s own speech patterns and “lingo,” regionalisms as it were. Although my mother left Virginia in 1948, she said “y’all” when she referred to more than one of us all her life. I’ve picked up the use of “y’all” from my years in Texas, not a word you would hear in New York, It just slipped into my speech since everyone uses it and it does serve a purpose, to distinguish that one is talking to more than one person. It takes the place of the ancient word “ye” to distinguish plurality. There are other Texas phases that are quite colorful and that I won’t go into now, but I love this one, “This ain’t my first rodeo,” meaning don’t try to put something over on me.
Do you have any special words of phrases that are part of your regional speech patterns? And don’t go “over yonder” without permission, “youins” hear?.
This post is part of a month-long series, A-Z, that I am participating in for the month of April.
Great post!