Don't be doing that

Tonight at my pottery class, being the safety geek that I am, I advised a student intent on carving a nearly bone-dry pot to do it over the sink: "You really don't want to be breathing in all that clay dust," I said, observing the powdery accumulation on the table and in her lap.

As soon as I uttered it, I realized I had an authentic use of an acquired Southernism on my hands. I plucked it from the air, put it in my pocket, and present it now for you, gentle readers:

Don't + be + Verb-ing.

Try it:

Don't be leaving your coat on the floor!
Eww, gross, don't be licking that!

You can pretend to know other people's inner desires by inserting the verb want after don't, as in:

You don't want to be teasing the cat, he'll scratch you.

A little Googling reveals that such constructions belong to a broader category of be-usage called the habitual be. The habitual be is a way to indicate a continuous directive. When you say Don't be licking that, you mean it's a bad idea, now and in the future, to lick that, so don't do it. By comparison, the briefer command, don't lick that, is a more limited imperitive: certainly you should not lick that, but you don't necessarily need to make a habit of not licking it because, after all, how often is the opportunity to lick it going to present itself?

How the habitual be arrived in the southern U.S. is unclear: it's common in Irish English as well as African-American Vernacular English, among other dialects. And to be honest, I'm assuming it's Southern only because I don't remember it invading my own speech anywhere else in the country.

You guys 'n' y'all

One of the more unfortunate shifts in the English language a few centuries back was the fusing of thou and ye into the single, all-encompassing you, a pronoun that now stands for both you-singular and you-plural. (One of the cleverer shifts has been the consequent elimination of you-formal, which is what you formerly was, but that's another story.) I thought Southerners had cornered the market on a solution with the brilliant second-person plural pronoun y'all, but thanks to my new copy of How We Talk: American Regional English Today by Allan Metcalf (2000), I am reminded that I grew up with the Northerner's version of the same: you guys.

You guys, like y'all, isn't something one sees in formal prose. Unlike y'all, it has the disadvantage of being blatantly gendered. Although one might hail a group of both males and females with the phrase hey you guys!, the word guys without a preceding you is distinctly masculine. (Metcalf explains that the word guys originated in reference to effigies of the 17th-century wannabe English Parliament blower-upper, Guy Fawkes. Fawkes' "Gunpowder Plot" was foiled on November 5, 1605, and celebrations of Guy Fawkes Day began in the 18th century. The OED dates the word guy to the early 19th century.)

You guys, because it includes an unadulterated you, is somewhat awkward when it comes to possessive forms. Turn down you guys's car radio sounds strange, even though it's dialectally correct, while Turn down your guys's car radio is just plain wrong, since it suggests that whoever you is controls guys rather than a shared car radio. Change the command to a simple Turn down your car radio and the editor breathes a concise sigh of relief, but the you-plural is lost.

Y'all has the benefit of dropping the -ou while retaining the y-, so the pronoun loses some of its obvious you-ness. One can thus derive possessive forms of y'all with relative ease, as in Turn down y'all's car radio. The especially enthusiastic speaker might emphasize the pluralness of y'all by making it y'alls, thus, Turn down y'alls's car radios. If more than about three folks are making a ruckus, one could say All y'all might should turn down the car radio. It's a bizarre twist, that all y'all, for its existence suggests y'all itself is on the way to becoming singular.

Metcalf mentions a few other you-plural options: yiz (in Philadelphia, where yous is the singular); yinz (in Pittsburgh, derived from you ones); and youse and you-uns, both regional Northern variants. Take y'alls's picks, but I'm sticking with the Southern solution.