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Post by LCF on Apr 1, 2023 6:11:06 GMT
I was watching Tom and Jerry and Tom was playing this song
Is you is or is you ain't my baby.
This is so wrong grammatically but it so works. How else can you say this with the same zing? "Are you or. are you not" just does not work.
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Post by Bitmap on Apr 1, 2023 6:15:36 GMT
Did he catch the mouse that way this one time?
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Post by LCF on Apr 1, 2023 6:19:06 GMT
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Post by Bitmap on Apr 1, 2023 6:25:49 GMT
This is so wrong grammatically but it so works. How else can you say this with the same zing? " Are you or. are you not" just does not work. I'm not entirely sure why some English dialects like to mistreat the 2nd person, but I can see the rational behind "is" and "ain't" if you just take them as labels for "yes" and "no" ... In other words, you could ask somebody "are you a 'yes' or a 'no'?" and it would make sense, both semantically and grammatically. By the same token, you could ask "are you an 'is' or an 'ain't'?" Well, ok, I kind of get the play of words that ensues from there. |
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Post by LonginusNaso on Jul 13, 2023 8:57:54 GMT
While Louis Jordan was being cheeky when he wrote this, to this day one still hears speakers of Black English say things like "What is you doin' here?" That is, in the south, 'you is/is you' used to be roughly as grammatical as the word '(h)ain't', although I ain't heard a no white folks a-sayn the first'nny more 'n I dun et up a whole messa cornpone.
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