Heard an unintentionally funny line on the radio this morning:<\/p>\n
\n\"There's only one person who can answer this, and that's y'all.\"<\/p>\n
—Car Talk<\/cite> caller, 4 April 2010.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Of course, \"y'all\" can be singular in some dialects. But in this case it was clear that the caller was addressing two people, the two Car Talk<\/cite> guys. It seemed to me that there was even a slight hesitation before \"y'all\" as she realized what she was saying, but I may have read too much into it.<\/p>\n
I don't remember for sure, but I don't think she had a Southern accent; I suspect she was using the Northerner version of \"y'all,\" which I've been hearing more often in recent years as a disambiguating plural \"you\" (which is also how I use it).<\/p>\n
It may well be that she thought of the Car Talk<\/cite> guys as interchangeable—I know I can't tell them apart. But I think there may've been something else going on as well:<\/p>\n
I'm pretty sure I've heard a construction like \"there's only one X, and it's Y\" (with Y being a plural noun) before, may even have said it myself.<\/p>\n
So it may be that \"there's only one X\" is a kind of idiom or semi-fixed phrase or exaggeration-for-effect that really just means \"Y is very likely to be an X.\"<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Heard an unintentionally funny line on the radio this morning: “There’s only one person who can answer this, and that’s y’all.” —Car Talk caller, 4 April 2010. Of course, “y’all”…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,48,73,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12953","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-funny","category-idioms","category-regionalisms","category-usage"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12953","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12953"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12953\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}