Coping With Ya'll

"Ya'll" was always a cowboy thing to me. We had our good-ol'-boys in Central Illinois, those who embraced the redneck stereotype while waving their rebel flags and drove trucks that would break all sound-related city ordinances if my hometown had any. Their accents always danced the line of southern without jumping the Mason-Dixon line. Never full Texas, but distinctly rural. And nobody said "ya'll."

My first exposure to "ya'll," that is to say, the first time I heard the contraction without a television speaker as a mediator, was when a girl starting going to my middle school after she moved with her family from Texas. She didn't have the accent--in fact, she sounded more like us than some of us did. But she said, "ya'll." Everything else had that Midwestern lack of twang, and then she'd hit that address to a group of people. "How ya'll doing?" You'll notice that the g remains at the end of doing, not contracted by any means. It seemed to emphasize the anomalous presence of the word, like speaking Spanish but dropping a German word in. I wasn't around her much (a year younger than me) so I never got used to the word's use.

My mom bought me a t-shirt when she took a trip to visit her friend who now lived in Texas after spending most of her life in Northwest Indiana. On it was the Texas flag with its lone star and the phrase, "It's a Texas thing, ya'll wouldn't understand it." I wore it but never thought much of it until the new girl saw my shirt and told me that she was from Texas. She didn't sound like it until she read the shirt out loud and hit that hard ya'll.

In my college town, there was a restaurant that was never open since I started as a freshman. From what I understand, the owner refused to relinquish ownership but had no immediate plans to reopen the restaurant. I heard they served food you'd see at a Popeye's or Long John Silver's. The outside was colorful, sharing the same color scheme as a Long John Silver's with blue siding and yellow trim. The parking lot was overgrown, populated by weeds infiltrating the cracks in the pavement and bereft of cars carrying hungry people. Above the front of the restaurant in straight-lined stylized lettering was the phrase, "How Ya'll Doin?" No apostrophe at the end of Doin, but a question mark as if to suggest they owners were genuinely interested how passersby were. Or maybe everybody. "Ya'll" is inclusive.

A trip to North Carolina immersed me further into "ya'll" culture. It was a similar sensation as when the girl from Texas greeted me or anyone else, except everyone around me was doing it. It wasn't until then that I came to that epiphany that nearly everyone we talked to lacked anything resembling an accent and sounded like the Nebraskans they tell newscasters to mimic, except for "ya'll." I never thought the word would induce a feeling of cognitive dissonance in me.

And then I moved down here. Everybody says "ya'll," regardless of accent. Everybody. I'm not used to it. Neither is Sam. I hear it in restaurants, grocery stores, antique stores. It's weird. I'm not offended, of course, but I'm still not used to it. Maybe I won't be. But I probably should get used to it.