All Y'all 'Bout Fixin' to Learn a Lesson
And other fun ways Southerners use apostrophes to replace pesky letters in words that are way too long anyway
I am from Tennessee, born and raised. Once, early in my freshman year of college (a college that was in Vermont, and full of boarding-school kids from New England, which is the only way of explaining what happened next), I made an astute observation in a discussion section of a large American history class that got the professor’s attention. I was feeling quite proud of myself until an upperclassman came up to me and said “You know, you’re not as dumb as your accent makes you sound.”
Well, duh. As Elle Woods once said, also astutely, to a man who doubted her intelligence, “Am I on glue, or did we not get into the same school?”
As a result of that exchange with that dude whose name I don’t even remember, I lost a lot of my accent. I regret that now, not least because having a Southern accent enables you to say WAY fewer syllables (even if it means you draw them out a lot more) and replace the missing ones with our friend, the apostrophe.
Welcome back to Apostrophe Philosophy! Today we’re going to discuss the fine art of chopping letters off or out of perfectly fine words and replacing them with apostrophes, and how you know — like Kenny Rogers — when to hold them, and when to fold them.
Let’s start with y’all, that most stalwart of all Southern contractions. The apostrophe in y’all confuses all y’all.
Y’all is the contraction of you all. Yep, that’s it. For such a storied little word, it’s really pretty simple. If you remember previous discussions of contractions, which occur when you squash together two other words into one, the key to adding in the apostrophe is to figure out what letters have been removed from the full phrase. Here, that means the o-u in you. So, y— all becomes y’all.
If you are not yet mentally prepared to add y’all into your vocabulary, this works with all other contractions as well.
Cannot —> can—t —> can’t
We are —> we-re —> we’re
I had —> I—d —> I’d
I am —> I-m —> I’m
Let us —> let-s —> let’s
But Southerners also like to remove letters from the beginnings and ends of words. If you’re going to talk slow as molasses, you might as well take a shortcut, right?
Fixin’ is a common example of something very popular in Southern dialect, which is the elision of the g at the end of words ending in -ing. Likely, you won’t come across this in very formal writing, but if you’re reading a novel where a character has a Southern accent, you’ll see it.
The beauty of the Southern fixin’, in particular, is that it allows you to be both specific and vague about your intentions simultaneously. It connotes that you are planning something, preparing something, juuuuuuust about to do something, without ever fully committing. It’s a really good word for an introvert.
Are you attending that meeting today?
Fixin’ to.
Did you get something for dinner tonight?
Fixin’ to.
Have you written the newsletter yet?
Fixin’ to.
All of that good intention, and not a single g to get in your way! Southerners are geniuses, really. Take that, college classmate!
I want to end with a shoutout to my friend Mary, who texted me within a minute of my hitting send on last week’s newsletter to show me a presentation she was preparing at work about Dos and Don’ts. Making a difference!
Thank you for spreading the gospel on the correct placement of the apostrophe. It really grinds my gears when I see it after the a.
I'd also like to shout out y'all not only for its brevity but also for its gender-neutral inclusivity!
Multiple LOLs this week and thanks for the shoutout!