New Orleans Edition: Where Y'at?

I arrived in New Orleans yesterday and dragged my trumpet down to Frenchmen Street, fully prepared to have a teenager mop the floor with me on a street corner jam session. There was one such group; four trumpets, two trombones, sousaphone and drums, and all four trumpeters were younger than 20 and all four put my conditioning to shame. I drifted into a bar called 30 x 90 where a jam session was advertised. I was welcomed onto the stage and the drummer Gene, who was running the session, gave me exactly what The Grammar Dance was looking for as he called up the house band.

“I need the band up here. Where y’at?” Obviously, “where y’at” is a contraction of “where are you at,” itself a grammatical stubbed toe. It is a case of ending a sentence with a preposition, but more than that, the preposition is wholly unnecessary in the first place. “Where are you” suffices perfectly to convey the sense of the question. But how fun is that? The answer is not at all.

Imagine a cool-as-iced-tea bandleader taking the microphone and saying, “I need the band back up here. Where are you?” No sizzle whatsoever. That said, “where y’at” doesn’t stop there. It is additionally used as a general and polite inquiry as to one’s health and happiness at a moment of encounter. The geolocation component is of course negligible when “Where y’at” is used as a greeting. Why would you ask such a question when the person is standing right in front of you? Were the person being asked unaware of the dual sense of the greeting, she might say, “I’m on Austerlitz and Tchoupitoulas, you big ninny. Same as you.”

The idiomatic answer to the “Where y’at” greeting, provided all is well, is “Awrite,” a phonetic expression of the phrase “all right,” delivered in a drawl that is born of high humidity, warm temperatures and a lifetime of exposure to genuine friendliness.

The Nashville Edition: Y'all

It’s the first and for a while the only Nashville episode of The Grammar Dance, as vacation brings me to New Orleans tomorrow, which is one of America’s great repositories of regional grammar peculiarities. Until tomorrow evening though, I am in the land of y’all. Or rather, one of many lands of y’all, as y’all is a colloquial contraction whose reach continues to spread.

The breadbasket of y’all would have to be Texas, but its use remains heavy north to the Oklahoma panhandle and then moves eastward through Arkansas and Louisiana, straight through the deep south and into Florida, with heavy use still felt in Tennessee and across to the mid-Atlantic seaboard states. Its use peters out in Pennsylvania and drops off significantly northeast into New England and due north once you hit Missouri. By Minnesota, it’s pretty well gone, with western states like Nevada and Arizona carrying on a casual, uncommitted relationship with it.

As a part of speech, it is a second person plural pronoun, and when you consider that the proper version of the second person plural pronoun is simply you, perhaps there is a glaring hole in the potential expressiveness of our grammar. The plural form is identical to the singular form, and that strikes me as a missed opportunity for some additional color in the language. Y’all fixes that.

Though a traditionalist, I welcome y’all as a polite, inclusive and endearing means of addressing a group. It is interesting to note for the sake of comparison another second person plural American colloquialism that has its home in New York and New Jersey, youse, as in, “Do youse guys want to head down to Brooklyn tonight?”

So what’s the difference between y’all and youse? Not much, except in terms of mood and feel: y’all sounds like you’re about to get kissed whereas youse sounds like you’re about to get stabbed. There is a third one that for the most part has kept itself confined to its city of origin, and that is Pittsburg's dreadful yinz. It is my sense that yinz's hideousness will keep it right right where it is and there's nothing for the rest of us to worry about.

What's the Difference Between Pluperfect and Past Perfect? (Trick Question, No Fair)

The past perfect, or pluperfect as it sometimes called, is a verb tense that is disdained by if not most modern editors, then the most modern of editors. Seriously, the hipper your editor, the less she will like the past perfect. The way to get on her bad side for good is to refer to it as the pluperfect.

The past perfect indicates an action in the past that occurred before a different past action began. The one action must have been completed before the other started. “By the time we arrived, the girls had left.” If you were to say, “By the time we arrived, the girls left,” that would be messing up the past perfect.

In writing though, imagine how tedious a lot of past perfect usages would get. We had jumped before she ran and we had run before he jumped. Awful. In such a narrative bind, you could even be tempted to write, “had had.” This is often the result of a flawed story angle, born of either flashbacks or a ham-fisted narrative.

So use the past perfect when you need to, but like truffle salt and rock ’n’ roll harmonica, with the past perfect, a little goes a long way. If you find your story littered with the word had, there's a better way to tell it.

From Jerry Springer to a Coffee Shop Near You: Glottal Stop Pronunciations

I may be guilty at times of being the language equivalent of the fist-waving biddy shrieking at children to stay off his lawn, and so it continues today, this time with pronunciation and with “kids today” squarely in the cross-hairs over the employment of a glottal stop in two-syllable words whose syllabic break occurs over a double-T.

An excellent test word for this is button. It is properly pronounced with the double-T being articulated by the tip of the tongue touching the roof of the mouth and then staying there as vocal vibrations are quickly sent upward into the nasal cavities to produce the N sound.

The youthful mispronunciation involves a glottal stop instead of the tongue touching the roof of the mouth, followed by the syllable “in,” which makes the overall phonetic pronunciation resemble “buh in.” The most famous example of this glottal stop pronunciation is not from a double-T, but rather a single D. It is the Jerry Springer guest’s signature prelude to a fight, “Oh no you di – in’t.”

This pronunciation seems present in all races, nationalities and sexual identities, but I notice it chiefly among Americans too young to be president, and I recommend against it enthusiastically.

Best. Movie. Ever. Did This Construction Start With Chris Berman?

Slang isn’t always word-by-word. It is also common for popular phrases, whole sentences or partial constructions to come into sudden usage. We looked at one such trope the day before yesterday with the popular slang construction, “What it is is.”

Another pop construction I will admit to having derived some amusement from goes like this: Adjective. Noun. Ever.

The adjective is almost always a superlative, usually either best or worst, but it can also be hottest, coolest, dumbest, smartest or some other expression of extremity within its category. The noun is where you can get creative, and the word ever is required.

“Meanest. Teacher. Ever,” the child sniffed. One might consider that perhaps it was derived from sportscaster Chris Berman’s famous touchdown run yawp, “Could. Go. All. The. Way.”

I first heard this rhetorical setup on the west coast four years ago, and I appreciated its potential for dramatic oratory, but like so many pop expressions, it  lost its luster and despite my brief dalliance with it, the three sentence punch holds a different place in my heart now. Worst. Construction. Ever.

Bill Clinton, Master of the Verb "to Be"

Yesterday we talked about the “What it is is” construction that seems to be making the rounds, and I was reminded of the most famous “is is” construction of them all: Bill Clinton’s explanation to Solomon Wisenburg during the Ken Starr impeachment hearings as to how Monica Lewinsky’s affidavit that was referenced by his attorney at the Paula Jones deposition was not a lie.

By leading with someone else’s (Lewinsky’s) denial of an affair that was entered into evidence at a deposition of yet a third person, Paula Jones, Wisenburg introduced two degrees of separation that, while not to such a degree as to allow the denial to fairly be called hearsay, still muddied the connection enough to give the president a little wiggle room, which is all Slick Willie ever needs.

In addition, Lewinsky’s statement, introduced at the Paula Jones deposition, was very precise in its tense management of the verb to be: “…there is absolutely no sex of any kind in any manner, shape or form, with President Clinton.”

Wisenburg’s failure to parse the simple present from the simple past from the past participle proved to be his undoing. Clinton knows this stuff inside out and made a meal of him.

“It depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is. If "is" means is and never has been … that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.”

He went on to perform a game of rhetorical button-button-who’s-got-the-button, thanks to Wisenburg having approached him from a second person’s testimony at a third person’s deposition:

“it is somewhat unusual for a client to be asked about his lawyer's statements, instead of the other way around. I was not paying a great deal of attention to this exchange. I was focusing on my own testimony.  And if you go back and look at the sequence of this, you will see that the Jones lawyers decided that this was going to be the Lewinsky deposition, not the Jones deposition. And, given the facts of their case, I can understand why they made that decision. But that is not how I prepared for it. That is not how I was thinking about it.  And I am not sure, Mr. Wisenberg, as I sit here today, that I sat there and followed all these interchanges between the lawyers. I'm quite sure that I didn't follow all the interchanges between the lawyers all that carefully. And I don't really believe, therefore, that I can say Mr. Bennett's testimony or statement is testimony and is imputable to me. I didn't -- I don't know that I was even paying that much attention to it.”

He earned no points on that witness stand with the American people for his disingenuous gamesmanship, but when you're a goalie in a game of turd hockey, I guess you do what you have to do. Love him or hate him, one must objectively assess that Bill Clinton walked up to Solomon Wisenburg on that day, turned his hat sideways, flicked his ear, took his lunch money, turned him around and kicked him in the pants, and then sent him home over the verb to be.

"What it is is" is a Nasty Way to Start a Sentence

"What it is is,” is a popular construction that to me feels like a soapbox of condescension wherein the speaker can imply a pedagogical relationship between him and the listener. In the mind's eye of its utterer, the student sits lotus-legged, gazing up in doe-eyed hero worship at the guru, the Buddha, the subject matter expert.

“You may think grammar is for pussies,” says Grammar Dick as he hitches up his belt and spits a stream of tobacco juice that splashes his boots. “But that’s not what it is. What it is is a message that you care enough to have learned the language’s rules and conventions. What it is is an act of love.”

A noble sentiment, but delivered in a didactic tone. I recommend avoiding it always. Most especially don’t write or say, “What it is is what it is.” If you’re going to do something that horrible, at least shuffle that deck into the clichéd but slightly more tolerable, “It is what it is.”

The “is is” construction is bad in every way; in its redundancy, in its unmusicality, and in its way of letting you know the upcoming speech is intended to salve a human ego rather than solve a human problem.