Y’all, an elision of “you all,” is the pronoun that southerners use when they speak to more than one other person. Most of us crave a second-person-plural pronoun to go with a second-person-singular pronoun—the equivalent of thou and ye in Middle English and Usted and Ustedes in Spanish—but all we have at our disposal is you and you. In the United States, aside from you, y’all is the most popular pronoun for a bunch of you’s, followed by you guys, youse, yins, you ‘uns, and you lot.

Y’all gather ‘round from far and near,

Both city folk and rural,

And listen while I tell you this:

The pronoun y’all is plural.

If I should utter, “Y’all come down,

Or we-all shall be lonely,”

I mean at least a couple folks,

And not one person only.

If I should say to Hiram Jones,

“I think that y’all are lazy,”

Or “Will y’all let me use y’all’s knife?”

He’d think that I was crazy.

Don’t think I mean to criticize

Or that I’m full of gall,

But when we speak to one alone,

We all say you, not y’all.

(See COOL, HOAGIE, OK.)

Yankee. As the traditional saying goes, to a foreigner, a Yankee is an American. To a southerner, a Yankee is a northerner. To a northerner, a Yankee is a New Englander. To a New Englander, a Yankee is from Vermont. And to a Vermonter, a Yankee is someone who eats apple pie for breakfast.

The first verse of “Yankee Doodle,” as often sung today, runs:

Yankee Doodle went to town,

Riding on a pony.

Stuck a feather in his hat

And called it macaroni.

The original Yankees were Dutch settlers who had come to the new world, and Yankee may derive from the Dutch Jan Kaas, “Johnny Cheese.” Yankee migrated from an ethnic insult against the Dutch to New Englanders in general when the song began life as a pre-Revolutionary creation originally sung by British military officers. The intent of “Yankee Doodle” was to mock the ragtag, disorganized New Englanders with whom the British served in the French and Indian War.

Doodle first appeared in the early seventeenth century and derives from the Low German word dudel, meaning “fool” or “simpleton.” The macaroni wig was in high fashion in the 1770s and became contemporary slang for foppishness. The last two lines of the verse implied that the unsophisticated Yankee bumpkins thought that simply sticking a feather in a cap would make them the height of fashion. The colonists liked the tune of “Yankee Doodle” and adopted it as a robust and proud marching song. What was once a derisive musical ditty became a source of American pride.

(See FILIBUSTER.)

Yeoman. English spelling is characterized by what is called the phoneme-grapheme chasm, a great gulf between the way words sound and the way they look. To illustrate, here’s a twenty-three word sentence in which every word but one contains a long oh sound, yet each word spells that sound differently:

Although yeoman folk owe pharaoh’s Vaud bureau’s depot hoed oats, chauvinistic Van Gogh, swallowing cognac oh so soulfully, sews gross-grained, picoted, brooched chapeaux.

(See EINSTEIN, GHOTI, HICCOUGH.)