Hey, you guys! Let's all say 'you all' or 'y'all'

A water tower in Northern Kentucky first promoted the Florence Mall but the city
learned it couldn't do that, so "y'all" was a replacement. (Photo by Getty Images)

Here's one thing Americans can be blessedly thankful for: We don't have to say "You guys" anymore. Not at restaurants or family gatherings, not when trying to get everyone's attention, and not when we really don't know "who-all" should be included. We can send our gratitude to historian David Parker, who looks at the contraction's past and gives everyone permission to say "y'all" (short for "you all").

"While 'y’all' is considered slang, it’s a useful word nonetheless," Parker writes for The Conversation, a platform for journalistic writing by academics. "The English language doesn’t have a good second person plural pronoun; 'you' can be both singular and plural, but it’s sometimes awkward to use as a plural. It’s almost like there’s a pronoun missing. 'Y’all' fills that second person plural slot – as does 'you guys,' 'youse,' 'you-uns' and a few others."

“'Y'all' might serve an important function, but it has acquired negative connotations,” Parker notes. “Back in 1886, The New York Times ran a piece titled 'Odd Southernisms' that described 'y'all' as 'one of the most ridiculous of all the Southernisms'. . . . Like the Southern dialect in general, the use of 'y’all' has often been seen as vulgar, low-class, uncultured and uneducated. As someone noted in Urban Dictionary, 'Whoever uses [y’all] sounds like a hillbilly redneck.'”

In tracing the etymology of "y'all," Parker explores several options from American, English (a 1631 poem) and Nigerian. His verdict is "murky," but he does get to the point: "The word seems to have grown in popularity. An article in the Journal of English Linguistics in 2000, "The Nationalization of a Southernism," said that scientific polling showed ”'Y'all will soon be seen as an American, rather than Southern, word.”

And maybe with good reason. Parker writes that “'you guys' . . . is losing support because of its sexist connotations. Are females included in you guys? How about those who identify as nonbinary?"

Airbnb listings that advertise Southern culture a surprisingly decent way to define the South, data journalist writes

Share of a state's Airbnb listings that mention terms such as "Southern hospitality," "Southern cooking" or "Southern charm," to name a few. (Washington Post map using Airbnb listing data)

It can be kind of hard to specifically define the South. "The South isn’t just geographic. Plenty of states in the southern half of the United States aren’t even remotely Southern. It’s not entirely historical — it probably goes beyond the boundaries of the Confederate States of America, but doesn’t encompass every former slave state on the Union side. It’s entirely cultural. And culture is notoriously hard to measure," Andrew Van Dam reports for The Washington Post. "Normally, an argument like this would be settled by the Census Bureau, the ultimate arbiter of all things dweeb. But the Census definition of the South seems wildly generous, sweeping up every state from Delaware in the East to Oklahoma in the West."

Data journalists such as himself have been trying—and failing—to find a decent yardstick for some time. But "a final answer remained elusive until we noticed just how many places on Airbnb advertise their 'Southern hospitality' or their 'Midwestern charm,'" Van Dam writes. "All those Airbnb hosts were, we realized, creating a one-of-a-kind map of America’s true cultural boundaries. Airbnb listings represent hundreds of thousands of pages of text capturing exactly how Americans describe their home regions to outsiders, and every single word of it has a geographic location attached."

Trade-aid payments questioned due to regional differences, even within states, and less transparency of calculations

The program to compensate farmers for low crop prices caused by the trade war with China has paid higher rates in the South, sparking some regional resentment, April Simpson of Stateline reports.

"The payments are intended to support farmers for crops like soybeans and corn that were subject to retaliatory tariffs from China," Simpson explains. "In North Dakota, which typically sends more than two-thirds of its soybeans to China, it’s more expensive to send exports to new markets such as Europe. Lawmakers, academics and farmers question whether the aid has favored certain regions and states, and whether the payments line up with farmers’ actual economic losses."

The rates for the Market Facilitation Program vary even within states. Farmers in western North Dakota are generally getting a lower rate than those in the eastern part of the state. The program has picked “winners and losers between regions and crops,” Democrats on the Senate Agriculture Committee said in a November report.

"The minority members represent the Corn Belt, West and Northeast," Simpson notes. "The report provides evidence that the 2019 MFP awarded 95 percent of top payment rates to Southern farmers; helped wealthy farms and foreign companies; and offered no long-term investment or plan for rebuilding lost markets."

This year's payments were calculated differently than last year's, which were based on production and county averages. "A lack of transparency in how this year’s payments were calculated has opened the USDA to criticism," Simpson writes. "This year’s payment rates were distributed on a per-acre basis and range from $15 to $150. Rates of more than $100 an acre are concentrated in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas and Arizona, according to the University of Illinois publication farmdoc daily. The difference is caused in part by the increasing MFP payment per pound of cotton, which went from 6 cents to 26 cents between 2018 and 2019. Cotton is largely produced in the South. By contrast, the payment per pound of corn went from 1 cent to 14 cents. Counties in the West, upper Midwest and Eastern seaboard tended to be paid at rates below $50 an acre." Read more details here.

Some in rural Ill. want to shed Chicago; won't happen, but shows rural-urban divide that helped Trump win other states

Bureau of the Census map; click on it to enlarge

Illinois has become the latest state where rural lawmakers want to break it up to eliminate urban domination, but with a different twist. Instead of a relatively small rural area breaking off from the rest of the state, rural Illinois legislators want Congress to make Chicago the 51st state.

Their resolution "has eight Republican cosponsors in the state House (there are 44 Republicans in the lower chamber) and support among many of the state’s conservative activists. It’s the second such bill in as many years," Matt Vasilogambros reports for Stateline.

The chief sponsor, Rep. Brad Halbrook, "cites the many issues tearing the state apart," Stateline reports. "He listed Democrats’ 'overreaching' stances on abortion, guns, immigration, debt, pensions, Medicaid spending, property taxes, green energy and workers’ compensation as just some of the reasons" Chicago and Illinois should separate.

Chicagoland and Downstate Illinois have long had differences. They "hit a breaking point several years ago, when Illinois was mired in the longest fiscal stalemate in the United States since the Great Depression," Vasilogambros writes. "The budget battle between Democratic lawmakers and then-Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner lasted more than two years, threatening public university accreditation, statewide road construction and 'junk' credit ratings.

Halbrook told Stateline the mess was the fault of Chicagoland Democrats: “Everywhere I go, people say we just need to get rid of Chicago. It gets rid of all of our problems. My constituency is serious about it. I’m trying to save the state.” He is from Shelbyville, pop. 4,600, in central Illinois.

Cook County, which includes Chicago, has 40% of the state's 12.7 million people. The broader Chicago metropolitan area has 9.5 million, or 75%, so "without the Chicagoland area, Illinois would have fewer people than Connecticut," Stateline notes.

John Jackson, author of a recent study about Illinois regionalism and a visiting professor at the Paul Simon Institute at Southern Illinois University, told Stateline that a breakup is unrealistic. "But, he said, that doesn’t mean he thinks the movement is just a fool’s errand," Vasilogambros writes. "It’s about broader resentment."

“This represents a long-standing rural and urban divide that is serious in this state and prevents things from getting done,” Jackson told him. “It’s the same phenomenon all over the country, and drove the Trump vote in 2016 and will again in 2020.”

The Commonwealth Fund issues its second Scorecard on Local Health System Performance

Population health is usually measured by lines of government jurisdiction, such as states and counties. But regional health systems often don't follow those lines, and are built around major hospitals that perform complex surgeries. The hospital referral networks create regional health-care markets, and the U.S. has 306 of them, as defined by the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care. Here's a screenshot from it:

The Commonwealth Fund, a foundation that aims to create a high-performing health system, uses the regional markets to measure the health of their population and the efficacy of their health systems. Today it issued its second Scorecard on Local Health System Performance, based on 2013 and 2014 data and comparing it to the 2011 data used on the first scorecard. The 2014 data reflect the impact of federal health reform, especially the state-by-state expansion of eligibility for the Medicaid program.

"The scorecard shows that many U.S. communities experienced improvements: fewer uninsured residents, better quality of care in doctors’ offices and hospitals, more efficient use of hospitals, and fewer deaths from treatable cancers, among other gains," The Commonwealth Fund says. "Still, the persistence of widespread differences between areas is a reminder that many local health systems have yet to reach the potential attained elsewhere in the country."

The scorecard data are presented in interactive fashion, showing changes in the four major dimensions (access, prevention and treatment, healthy lives and avoidable trips to the hospital, including hospital costs) and the 35 individual elements that make up those dimensions. Here's an example:

The hospital regions are based on ZIP codes but in most cases roughly follow county lines. The Dartmouth Atlas allows you to look up data by ZIP code. For examples of stories about the five regions based in one state, see Kentucky Health News.

USDA likely to announce regional-alliance program

A program favoring increased emphasis on regional alliances in rural America is likely to be announced soon, says the under secretary of rural development at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Dallas Tonsager hinted at the announcement while speaking to chairs of agriculture committees from 47 state legislatures meeting at the Legislative Agricultural Chairs Summit last weekend, Bill Bishop of The Daily Yonder reports.

"We’ll becoming out soon with a proposal on regionalism," Tonsager told the legislators. "I would urge you to look at what Iowa did when [USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack] did when he was governor [of Iowa]." While in Iowa, "Vilsack went so far as to propose reducing the number of counties from 99 to about 15, following the lines of community college districts," Bishop writes.

Advocates of rural regionalism say "counties working together will be more successful in their development efforts than if they plunge ahead without cooperating," Bishop reports. The summit also included sessions about dealing with animal rights advocates, creating rural caucuses in state legislatures, cap-and-trade legislation and the widening rural-urban division. (Read more)

Tasty Thanksgiving leftover: Interactive maps show which recipes were sought most or least, by state

Kentucky is the corn-pudding capital of America, and its mother state, Virginia, is runner-up. But in West Virginia, the traditional Thanksgiving dish seems less popular than nationwide, based on geographic counts of search terms typed into Allrecipes.com, as reported by Kim Severson of The New York Times.

Kentucky is also the leader in broccoli casserole. Green bean casserole is most favored in Montana, Wyoming and Nevada. Sweet potato pie is clearly a delicacy of the old Confederacy, but pecan pie is by far an Arkansas concoction. And the most interest in pecan pie is found in Utah. Of course, because these rankings are based on searches, they don't include people who already know a recipe. Maybe that's why the Southeast ranked below average in searches for "sweet potatoes." But the Times has assembled a great interactive map showing the top 50 search terms, state by state.