![]() For example, someone who had grown up in Chicago but moved away about 30 years ago was puzzled when, a couple of weeks ago, a friend requested they “move over a titch.” Another friend, when asked if she wanted any coffee, said “just a titch.” Both friends have lived in Chicago about 30 years, but are from elsewhere the native, now living in New York, had never heard the phrase. Regionalisms can be spread beyond a region. It can be referring to a single person or, as our Ohioan used it, to mean “someone.” It’s also spelled “ y’ins.” If you believe Wikipedia (sometimes an iffy proposition), it’s a mashup of the Scotch-Irish “you ones.” “Yins” in western Pennsylvania could be “y’all” in much of the South, “youse guys” in Brooklyn, and “you lot” in England. ![]() Like jargon, it’s a way of communicating with “people like you,” and perhaps excluding others. A term can be localized only among a certain demographic, or it may be used in rural areas but not urban ones. (To be fair, much of Pennsylvania considers Philadelphia to be a separate state.) Yet the person who’s lived in Philadelphia nearly all his life had never heard it. It seems to have originated in western Pennsylvania, according to several online slang dictionaries. ![]() “Some yins?” another member, from Philadelphia, replied, using an alternative spelling. “Some yinz please make the call,” one member, who lives in southwestern Ohio, wrote. Some members of a committee were discussing an issue via email, and it was going on a little too long.
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