Re: Second person familar as contempt (Re: ash nazg on my pinky because it's too small)

Quoting Danny Wier <dawier@...>:

> From: "Christophe Grandsire" <christophe.grandsire@...>
>
> > We have the same use, except that the polite form can *also* be used
> > contemptuously when talking to people you'd usually refer to with the
> > familiar pronoun ;))))) . Does any other language with a polite/familiar
> > distinction has this? :)))
>
> I only know of Farsi.
What about your own native dialect, Danny?  In my dialect, the
use of analytic second person constructions, like "you people"
or "you guys", is a way to distance yourself, esp. from family and
friends with whom one always uses the synthetic "y'all".  (One
of the things that always irritated my mother about Rush Limbaugh
is that he constantly used "you people", which is a threatening
construction.) It's one of the things that I've had to get used
to living in the North that's slightly jarring, along with the
unwillingness to make eye-contact, since said unwillingness is
considered anti-social in the South.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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