Words that are Seldom Used Today!

horseless carriage said:
And I wouldn't mind betting that you might just start using the word, bespoke.
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You'd be correct! I embrace fun words.

Until a friend pointed it out, I hadn't realized that my daughter and I rarities among Americans because we say "Blimey" on a regular basis.

I've started to incorporate "y'all" into my vocabulary despite it being very much a Southern US term and I'm not in any way a Southerner. Still, y'all has a certain charm and is far preferable to the easy-to-misinterpret plural "you," and miles better than "you guys," which has largely replaced that plural you. Don't get me started on "you guyses" as a further plural or possessive plural in place. I want to go screaming into the night when I hear statements like, "I think you guyses coats are over there." or "I think your guyses coats are over there."

My most irritation with the English language surrounds the lack of a gender neutral pronoun for creatures who have genders. The bizarre, awkward, solution has become they/them to describe a single human whose gender is either unknown or fluid.

Rather than devising a couple of new words, the solutions to these two fuzzy areas is to introduce confusion to two pronouns that had heretofore been unambiguous. Blimey!
 
StarSong said:
You'd be correct! I embrace fun words.

My most irritation with the English language surrounds the lack of a gender neutral pronoun for creatures who have genders.
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This is not the case in Scotland, or it wasn't in the past,
they produced a plural form of "You", quite simply it
is "Yous".

Maybe not all over Scotland, but certainly in the West,
around Glasgow.

I have never seen it written, so maybe it ends with an E!

Mike.
 
Mike said:
This is not the case in Scotland, or it wasn't in the past,
they produced a plural form of "You", quite simply it
is "Yous".

Maybe not all over Scotland, but certainly in the West,
around Glasgow.

I have never seen it written, so maybe it ends with an E!

Mike.
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That was also used in certain areas of NY when I was a kid, but I'm not sure if it's still popular.
 
Mike said:
This is not the case in Scotland, or it wasn't in the past,
they produced a plural form of "You", quite simply it
is "Yous".

Maybe not all over Scotland, but certainly in the West,
around Glasgow.

I have never seen it written, so maybe it ends with an E!

Mike.
Click to expand...
When I was young, the plural for you was said as yous, as in yous guys. It was frowned upon as incorrect English but we nostalgically use it from time to time anyway.
 
StarSong said:
Until a friend pointed it out, I hadn't realized that my daughter and I rarities among Americans because we say "Blimey" on a regular basis.
Click to expand...
Using Blimey at my Catholic school in the 1950's would get you into serious trouble. Blimey is a euphemism (specifically a minced oath) derived from 'God blind me'.

Blimey is first recorded in print in Barrère and Leland's A dictionary of slang, jargon and cant, 1889. The extended version was used, by Arthur Morrison in A Child of the Jago, 1896: "Gawblimy, not what!"

It's probably why strewth became so commonly used as an alternative. Blimey & strewth are both a way of expressing surprise or adding emphasis.
 

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