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Four Letter Words

My dad was smart, my dad was wise;
He crossed his t’s and dotted i’s.
His grammar skills were without taint.
And he did not say y’all or ain’t.

He taught an English class to teens
(In a suit and never jeans).
“Raise your hand, do not be late,
And never utter y’all or ain’t.”

“Be creative in your work.
Do not proper grammar shirk.
And never in your papers state
A shameful word like y’all or ain’t.”

He loved to read and loved to write
And made sure all his words were right;
What a story he could paint
(Never using y’all or ain’t).

He didn’t cuss except to quote
A necessary anecdote—
Even then he’d rather faint
Than stoop to words like y’all or ain’t.

From my mouth four letter words
Were never by him ever heard,
I did not dare to aggravate
My dad with words like y’all or ain’t.

When I moved to Tennessee
Words I thought were heresy
Were used with shocking unrestraint—
Everywhere were y’all and ain’t!

It’s taken many years for me
To say y’all with apparent ease.
I feel some guilt—I’ll tell you straight—
When I speak out a y’all or ain’t.

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Gigi Ryan is a wife, mother, grandmother, and home educator. She lives in rural Tennessee.

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27 Responses

  1. Paul Freeman

    That ain’t ‘art bad, Gigi, as we says in London.

    Nicely done.

    Reply
  2. Roy Eugene Peterson

    Welcome to the south, Gigi! Ain’t it great! The rest of y’all come down for a visit, ya hear. My mother was also an English teacher. One of her pet peeves was when someone asked, “How are you,” they would answer “Good.” I was always taught to say, “I am doing well.” I kept it up even when we moved to Texas. I enjoyed your poem.

    Reply
    • Gigi Ryan

      Dear Roy,
      I had a friend who was a stickler about answering “well,” instead of “good.” I try to keep that up myself.
      I do love the south and am trying to embrace the “y’all,” though I think “ain’t” will always cause me to cringe a bit.
      Gigi

      Reply
  3. Susan Jarvis Bryant

    I just love this poem, Gigi. It reminds me of my dad, who is the total opposite of yours. He’s a London cockney and my mum is a Queen’s English, never-drop-your-aitches lady. She often reprimanded my father for that sinful “ain’t” word. After a particularly scathing dressing down, my father proceeded to add inappropriate aitches to words until our house was rife with Helephants, Horanges, Horangutans, many other Hanimals, and the word Hain’t. I must admit to embracing the word y’all now I live in Texas, and wondering how I ever did without it in England. Thank you for this wonderful memory-prompt of a poem.

    Reply
    • Gigi Ryan

      Dear Susan,
      Thank you for your encouraging comment and for sharing the humorous memory. I love it. Your parents must be quite a pair!
      Gigi

      Reply
  4. Shamik Banerjee

    A strong penchant for country songs has embedded “y’all” and “ain’t” in my regular speech, and their usage amongst me and my friends is not rare. Funny how some words get into our systems with time. A very delightful poem, Gigi. Such light poems help us deal with the daily monotony and banality of life. Thank you so much.

    Reply
    • Gigi Ryan

      Dear Shamik,
      You are welcome – and thank you for commenting.
      Yes, some words will get into our systems over time, won’t they? And some will never leave. I grew up in the Baltimore suburbs and will say, “You guys” to refer to males and/or females until the day I die, though I fear I do offend the more genteel southerners when I do so.
      Gigi

      Reply
  5. Cheryl Corey

    A charming poem. We have such interesting speech patterns and dialect throughout the country: I think they say “youse” in Philly; and I’ll never forget the time I was in Boston and I heard someone pronounce “pahk the cah”.

    Reply
    • Gigi Ryan

      Dear Cheryl,
      Thank you. I do enjoy the varied dialects. A friend moved to the south and asked for help finding ice in the grocery store. The clerk couldn’t understand her northern speech and very distinct sounds. She finally said, “Ice – you know – frozen water?” The light bulb when on, “Ooooohhhhh, you mean aaaaaaaassss.”
      Gigi

      Reply
  6. Joseph S. Salemi

    “Y’all” was created because English doesn’t have a proper second-person plural pronoun. (We used to have “ye,” but it is now obsolete.) The same is true from the “youse” that Cheryl mentions — it’s common in Brooklyn and other parts of New York and the tri-state area.

    Reply
    • Gigi Ryan

      Joseph,
      I am fond of “ye” myself.
      Apparently here in Tennessee “y’all” is singular. “All y’all” is plural.
      Gigi

      Reply
  7. Sally Cook

    Time has a lot to do with it, too. My father, born in 1892, loved using the word “ain’t”, a common Victorian word which suddenly became passe’ around 1900. He loved to make fun of the Victorian ladies of his childhood who made it a habit of pronouncing the words prunes and prisms presumably to train their lips to take a “proper” shape. Yikes 1 Well, he always a bit of a little boy, into his nineties.

    Reply
    • Gigi Ryan

      Dear Sally,
      Dialect and word customs are quite interesting. I have learned some new things from you today. Thank you!
      Gigi

      Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Sally, I spent the formative years of my childhood and early adolescence almost exclusively in the company of my parents and grandparents, all of whom were born between 1879 and 1915. As a result, my speech habits tend to be old-fashioned — maybe even atavistic.

      Drug addicts? I always referred to them as “hop-heads.”
      A brothel? To me its name was a “cat-house.”
      Refrigerator? We always called it an “ice box.”
      Hot dogs? To us they were “wieners.”
      Cigarettes? They were “butts.”

      I doubt if any of these are part of colloquial speech today.

      Reply
  8. C.B. Anderson

    Y’all ain’t no slouch when it comes to replicating akchool dialog. This pome was a fresh breeze in the humid whether happening here in Massiveblueshits.

    Reply
    • Gigi Ryan

      Dear C.B.,
      If I did not know that you knew better, this would be a very painful comment to read! I think I have inherited some of my father’s biases about correct speech.
      Gigi

      Reply
  9. Drilon Bajrami

    What a great and rythmic poem, Gigi. I can’t say that I share the same views as your father but when writing, even in slang, there’s no excuse for bad grammar. I usually switch up my verbiage depending on who I’m speaking to, I’ll go from my urban inner city London accent (the default) to received pronounciation when needed.

    Reply
    • Gigi Ryan

      Dear Drilon,
      Thank you for your encouraging comment! I think it is an act of grace to be able to adapt your speech around you and put those with whom you are communicating at ease.
      Gigi

      Reply
  10. Margaret Coats

    Gigi, you can count on dialect to interest poets! Relegating the questionable words to repetition in the refrain performs a kind of exorcism that makes the whole still more enjoyable, and shapes a great tribute to your father. I notice a colloquialism I grew up with in “aggravate” meaning “aggrieve.” I was most surprised to learn its dictionary meaning is “to make [something] worse or more burdensome.” But even the dictionaries now recognize its utility applied to every gal and guy we hope to horrify.

    Reply
    • Gigi Ryan

      Dear Margaret,
      I am glad you could read through this poem to my admiration of my father.
      In addition to the interest dialect holds for poets, it also brings its challenges. When I write, I forget that my reader may not share my pronunciations. I had this discussion with my souther-born daughter-in-law recently. I pronounce “fire,” with two syllables, she with one. Hers rhymes with car. Mine with higher.
      Gigi

      Reply
  11. Jeff Eardley

    Gigi, Winston Churchill observed that the US and England were two countries divided by a common language. We never use “y’all” or “ain’t” over here, although I recall a jazz song, “Is you is or is you ain’t my baby?”and a line from a John Prine song, “You is what you is and you ain’t what you ain’t.” Who needs Shakespeare with lines like these? Great fun to read today. Thank you.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Much of American English still retain elements of 17th-century pronunciation and usage, which is typical of a linguistic colony. The central locale of a language changes, while the peripheries tend to be conservative.

      Example: a typical Americanism is the phrase “I guess,” as in the sentence “I guess he won’t be here tonight.” You won’t hear it in the U.K. today, but the phrase appears in Elizabethan English, and even in Chaucer (“I gesse…”)

      Reply
    • Gigi Ryan

      Dear Jeff,
      I love that Churchill quote. I am not familiar with those songs, but I can appreciate that those lines would be catchy and humorous, perhaps even to my father, who did love music. I will have to look them up.
      Gigi

      Reply
      • Jeff Eardley

        Gigi, the John Prine song is “Dear Abby” The lyrics are hilarious.

  12. Joshua C. Frank

    Gigi, I love this! It’s great!

    My father was the same way about grammar, always correcting me on perfectly acceptable word usages, so I totally sympathize. The funny thing was, he was born in Alabama, yet he, too, would “rather faint/Than stoop to words like y’all or ain’t.”

    But, yes, I notice how those two words in particular are looked down on. I think it’s our culture’s anti-Southern bias, stemming from the Civil War. People say the South holds on to the war too much, but have you ever noticed how when the media want to make a character stupid, they give him a Southern accent?

    Reply
    • Gigi Ryan

      Dear Joshua,
      I had not consciously made the connection to the media and the use of a Southern accent to imply stupidity, but now that you mention it…

      The upside of my father’s fastidiousness was that he was very helpful to to me when I wrote papers in high school. I always had him proofread and give me feedback and was grateful for how perfect grammar seemed to come naturally to him. (Though I suspect he was self-taught in that area.)
      Gigi

      Reply

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