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Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

I've been using variations of "jawn" or "jawns" as my username for 20+ years.

It's a word that has endured surprisingly well, as slang goes. And it's a conspicuously egalitarian term. You'll find it used in both blue-collar and white-collar settings, and across racial lines. There's very little tribal attachment. Nobody cares if you appropriate it. The general sentiment is the more jawn users, the better.

But unfortunately, I'm afraid it may have jumped the shark when the "Jawn Morgan" billboards started appearing:

https://billypenn.com/2022/05/25/jawn-morgan-billboards-phil...

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ehhhh I disagree. I definitely cringe when I hear a hipster who's lived here for 2 years try to inject jawn into every conversation. Feels very forced. Also Jawn being put on pins and shirts is also very cringe to me

Yeah. I feel like there's two types of people that actually use jawn: those that are very Philly and those that are trying, really, really hard to sound Philly. I can't say I've said jawn with a straight face since I was a little kid.

"I definitely cringe" and "Also ... is also ... very cringe to me"

You certainly get plenty of mileage out of the word cringe. Is it a verb, is it an adjective - who knows? Your also ... also construct riffs on "either ... or", "both ... and" and the like. There must be a name for terms like that - you get them in Latin too so they've been around for a while eg nec ... necque (neither ... nor).

Jawn is just a colloquialism but I've seen also ... also several times before now. I've also seen very cringe too.

I am not taking the piss but I feel that I am watching language evolve right in front of me. I suspect that whilst this article and set of threads gets itself all whizzed up over jawn, it is missing the rather bigger point about language and conversations that travel at the speed of light instead of just sound and is distributed by the internet and not just the post office.

On HN we pontificators have an audience that a Roman Imperator could only dream of.

> when I hear a hipster who's lived here for 2 years try to inject jawn into every conversation. Feels very forced.

Same thing happens with "y'all", even though it's nowhere close to being as esoteric/regional. A couple years ago, Twitter seemed to have become obsessed with incorporating it conspicuously into every other tweet. I didn't even know "y'all" had rules until that happened. (I couldn't really tell you what those rules are, but it was popping up in places that were so syntactically awkward, by people who were clearly not "y'all" natives. So they definitely exist.)

I welcome the imminent and inevitable "y'all" supremacy as a way to help destigmatize the US southern accent. It's just a damn good word, y'all.

y'all are right

Sentences that end with a y’all still come across as distinctly Southern. Sentences that begin with y’all, on the other hand, sound normal or dare I say even hip. To me that is.

Thanks y’all

I also get annoyed when people I grew up started saying y'all. WE"RE PHILADELPHIANS WE SAY YOUS or you guys

Yinz be trippin'.

y'all is a fantastic alternative to "guys" and I will die on that hill.

This is the reason it’s gaining popularity.

I love ya'll because second person plural is something that English annoying lacks.

I'm also a fan of habitual be because it's something that can be expressed in English, but it sounds verbose or relies on context whereas "I be" is self explanatory without any context -you know that the speakers means "I regularly do/feel ___ "

My favorite phrase puts them together: "ya'll be trippin" is IMO the most efficient way in the English language to tell a group of people that their behavior is unacceptable.

I can see an immediate use for "y'all be trippin'" in the next presidential address on the topic of the January 6th insurrection.

On the one hand "yous" fills this void in a way that is more consistent with the rules of pluralizing words, but on the other hand it also introduces a homophone with "use" which could hypothetically lead to confusion. So which is worse, inconsistency (y'all) or ambiguity (yous)?

Ultimately, since "yous" never fits in the same grammatical slot as "use" (different part of speech), there's never any real chance at confusion anyway. Therefore I weigh in on the side of "yous".

Once again New York has it right and the rest of yous be trippin.

For Boston/Mass it's "wicked." You can tell when someone injects it naturally and they grew up with its various contexts, or you're a new transplant and it's usually used in every other sentence.

I was the latter circa 2012 but ~8 years in Boston tempered my use, haha.

> I definitely cringe when I hear a hipster who's lived here for 2 years try to inject jawn into every conversation. Feels very forced.

Yinz [0] has a special place in my heart, because I was born and raised in western PA, but yinzers [1] sometimes leaving me feeling the same way.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yinz

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yinzer

> across racial lines... Nobody cares if you appropriate it.

It seems like the first tweet from your linked article is suggesting otherwise.

ard

Thought that was a typo! But no: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ard

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