December 21, 2009

YAY!! Word(s) of the Day


For those of you who haven't see this yet.....I am making it a habit to share interesting, educational, and sometimes funny words with my family via email. I then post them to my blog to save for future reference and to share our fun with the world.
Here's this week's edition of "Word(s) of the Day"
I found an article that does a great job of clarifying some simple terms that are misused often in IM (instant message)  and text conversations at my work. Pet peeve of mine? Absolutely!! So....Learn it. Understand it. Don't mess with it. This  guy and I are on the same page. Read on.

Pet peeve: Yeah, Yay, Yea and Ya

It's time to address a pet peeve that's been bothering me lately. I keep reading comics that misuse "Yeah" and "Yay." Often, I see novice cartoonists writing one when they mean the other.
Yeah (yě'ə) is a slang of yes. "Yeah, I agree that Larry Fine was the Forgotten Stooge." Nine chances out of ten, if you're using a slang for yes, you want to use yeah.
Yay (yā) is an excited exclamation or a cheer. "Yay! Our team won!" If you're cheering, you probably want to use yay.
Yea (yey) is also a slang for yes, but it's not interchangeable with yeah. Because yea rhymes with hay. Unless you're quoting Biblical text about walking through the valley of death, you probably shouldn't be using Yea.
Ya (yah) can be used either as a slang for yes, but again, it's not interchangeable with yeah, and it shouldn't be used unless your character is speaking with a thick German or Swedish accent (in which case, it's actually a slang for Ja): "Ya, I would like more meatballs."
Ya (yah), of course, can be a slang for you, as in "End this column already, would ya?"
Posted by at

2 comments:

boot2thhead said...

Words of the Day will not be weekly. But keep an eye out....there will be more coming at ya.

December 23, 2009 at 1:16 AM
Bob and Carol Thompson said...

I read the blog this morning and have been itching to come back to add some fuel to your vocabulary "peeves".
What is a speech pathologist thinking when you are talking to them? Well, if you are family, friend, or interacting in any day-to-day capacity, they are just listening to what you have to say. If you are in an actual therapy session with them, they are listening to HOW you say things. So, you do not have to worry about your speech pathologist friends judging you any more than you would have to worry about a psychologist friend "analyzing" you when you are talking to them. We are all just people too and like to enjoy having normal conversations without any reservations based on what we do for a living.
That having been said, I now would like to share a few pet peeves that show up in therapy sessions. I know that Bo will have a field day with these so I'm just going to give a brief into to some of them.
First, "ask" is not pronounced "AX". When I hear this I have strange visions. "Did you ax your mother?" "All you had to do was ax me!" "Let's go ax the teacher." I guess I'll stop here for now to find out if Bo feels I've intruded on his blog space or if he wants to play the "weird words" game with me.

March 7, 2010 at 12:47 PM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)