Title text:
Borat came out twenty years ago this year–closer to the breakup of the Soviet Union than to today–but it honestly feels like it’s been even longer, somehow.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3237/
Just say partner. It’s a better description of what a marriage should be AND it’s gender neutral
AND you get to say ‘howdy’ when you see them
Is there an American first person plural for “y’all”?..“We’s”?
Yes! And you’ve nailed one of the most common.
Mind you, none of the ones I’ve run into reach the degree of usage y’all does.
But, there’s we’s, we’ns, and us’ns
This is all in my local area, or in areas close enough to have visited frequently.
No idea what yankees use for dialect first person plural, but we’ns down hyuh have it figgered out right nice.
However, if you want the dialect mind fuck of all mind fucks, wait until someone needs to address a large group of mixed sub groups and breaks out “all’a y’all’ns” which is said as a single unit all’a’y’all’ns. All of you all ones. It’s like a black hole of linguistics that sucks you in, and the closer you get, the more spaghettified your brain becomes.
They ain’t nuthin much more sigogglin than suthren talkin, an if’n it’s in the hills (aka mountains), y’all gonna have ta step quick ta keep up. Shit far (fire) and save matches, y’all damn feriners done missed out on some got dayum good talkin!
To the north (still solidly east coast) I would occasionally hear all’a’you’s and allyouse for a similar purpose.
Weesa acutally’bin’ talking like JarJar okieday!
“Us” and “we” exist in the language already.
y’all or you’ns or yinz or whatever evolved to fill a niche. English has an official second person singular, thee/thou/thy and the funny thing is thou canst still perfectly understand it, it makes perfect sense to thy ears, even my spell checker isn’t flagging any of this. But we don’t use it anymore because it sounds pompous and biblical, plus for some reason it comes with a bunch of fucky conjugations. Like “canst.”
French does still use theirs, tu vs vous, tu is singular but also informal, you speak that way to individual friends and loved ones, vous is used for plural as well as in formal speak, even if singular you say vous to your boss. English deprecatedest thou entirely and went entirely “you” which leaves too big of a gap. So Americans took “you” to be the new singular and invented “you all” and “you ones” in parallel for plural, slanged to y’all and you’ns the latter has no consistent spelling.
We’s typically means ‘us’ or also just we
Always sounded weird and corporate to me. Easiest to just ask what your SO would prefer to be called and not worry about what people might think when you say it
Partner sounds corporate…?
If anything, it sounds more scientific
It seems to be, at least partially, a generational thing.
I grew up in rural, conservative-town USA and am old enough to remember when “partner” was code for same-sex spouse that I’m not legally allowed to marry.
Whereas if you were in a state where you were allowed to marry your same-sex spouse, then they’d be your husband/wife.
Hearing it now, regardless of orientation, just sounds deliberately vague to some of us oldheads.
A Singaporean woman was the first person I heard refer to their opposite-sex partner as “partner” back in probably 2010 and I adopted it. I had a pretty skewed idea of marriage as a kid and it instantly changed my thinking.
Your spouse SHOULD be your partner. You’re on a team facing this big stupid world together.
What’s wrong with spouse? Have people forgotten that thesaurus exist? Spouse is already gender neutral, literally means married partner, and doesn’t sound like a corporate speak buzzword to make the drones feel like family.
Spouse sounds dumb.
What corporation calls their employees partners?