Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/03/30/pittsburgh-smokers-more-inclined-to-say-jagoff-than-yinz.html
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Yes but what is the correct pronunciation of “Appalachia?!” 
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Three of my four grandparents were born and raised in Pittsburgh before WWII. I’ve never understood where “yinz” came from—because they all very distinctly said “you’unz.”
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I grew up near Pittsburgh in the 60’s and I only ever heard “yinz”, not “you’unz”. “Yinz” was common enough that I never really thought of it as anything other than normal spoken English.
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…the correct pronunciation…
Well if you don’t pronounce it correctly, I’ll throw an apple accha.
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“The Holler”
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Ha, I got so used to the initial images in BB posts being AI images totally irrelevant to the story that I automatically ignored and scrolled past it and spent a moment confusedly reading through the post trying vainly to figure out how “jagoff” was being used as a pronoun and what smoking had to do with it. (And then quickly dismissed the headline/post as basically a series of non sequiturs until I came back and actually looked at the image.)
But I’m fascinated how English, having dropped the singular “thou” is trying to reconstitute the single/plural versions of “you” by adding a new word, and often by making “you” purely singular.*
*I’m also fascinated by people upset by “modern” usage of “they” as singular, even though it pre-dates the singular usage of “you.”
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Woo Hoo! Pittsburgh dialect thread!
“I’m goin dahn t’ Pants n 'Nat to buy some skool close. Yeah, it’s dahn ‘nere behin’ the Kaufmann’s”
(grew up there in the '70s and '80s… back when Kaufmann’s was still a thing.)
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From what I see it looks like the Jagoffs extinguished whatever they were smoking before responding to the survey, whereas the Yinzses (Yinzi?) did not.
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“Yinzapodes”
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Reading Yinzerspeak is like attending a family reunion. Whole clan was, and except for the branch my dad founded, still is hardcore Iron City drinking, Steeler loving, Kennywood riding South (excuse me, Sahth) Hills Yinzers from way back. Thank you for this trip dahn memory lane!
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“And don’t lose your little sister in Noah’s Ark like last time.”
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I maintain that “Appalachia” does not rhyme with “Appalachian.” This seems to be an unpopular opinion, but it’s mostly because I learned the latter as a kid on Long Island, but only really started hearing the former when I was living in Pittsburgh.
I always wondered if that was related to the loss of the thorn, which looked kinda like a y?
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My understanding is that “you” became singular for purely social reasons - initially there was a sort of equivalent of the “royal we,” where one would refer to higher-status individuals as “you,” and the usage expanded to include everyone, eventually. (Except the Quakers apparently kept using “thou” as the singular form for everyone, even after singular “you” became universal, because they didn’t like its origins in class inequality.)
The confusion of the thorn for y seems to have only happened long after the thorn was dropped. I understand that happened in large part because of English-as-second-language typesetters who were a big part of the early print industry (and were working with European typesets that lacked the thorn and wynn characters, etc.) and who heavily influenced modern spelling.
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great, I’ll start saying “the region near the Appalachian mountain range” instead of Appalachia to mask how I feel about it.
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