
“Howdy” is not like any other greeting. I don’t just mean it’s decidedly Texan and a little folksy. For the record, it’s an abbreviation of the formal “How do ye?” that got shortened to “how dee” and shortened again. There may be other places where howdy is said. But I have lived in more than a few states and traveled to even more, and I’ve never heard it outside Texas.
I mean that you can take any other greeting, a “hi” or a “hello,” and add an unfriendly word of your choosing, something that rhymes with other-clucker, maybe, and you can start a fight, if that’s your thing. It’s easy to misunderstand someone’s intent, in text or even in person. You can walk away from any conversation if you’re the overthinking sort, which I am, and spend a few hours or years wondering: What did they mean by that?
We’ve got memes to explain what a lot of our Texanisms mean, often incorrectly. “Bless your heart” used to mean “you poor sweet, stupid soul, at least you tried,” until Facebook got ahold of it. But even without the help of social media, you can take “y’all” and to start a fight all you need is to double it up. Nothing good has ever followed “all y’all.” All y’all means your mom’s about had it and you’d better get outside. All y’all means someone’s inside problem is about to happen at the next table and all y’all are in for a free show. And all y’all should mind your business, but you won’t.
That doesn’t work with howdy. Howdy’s like trying to start a fight while sipping from a cocktail straw with an umbrella in your drink. Howdy softens just about anything. Try it. “Howdy, (fill in the blank with the worst word you know).” The worst word you know cannot make howdy sound mad. I know a lot of worst words, and I have tried them all. Howdy makes the worst word you know sound like you were kidding, like you’re old friends or want to be new friends. Howdy’s a question that knows you might be busy. Howdy doesn’t require an answer, but it’d be glad to hear it if you’ve got the time.
I left Texas after high school and didn’t come back for 20 years. So, I didn’t hear howdy for two decades. And I didn’t know how much I missed it until I got back and heard my first howdy. It made me smile like a moron just hearing it. A howdy will do that because that’s what it’s meant to do. It’s the shortest word to say, “I’m happy to see you”—and mean it.
—Lauren Hough
As a 30-year Texas transplant, I can’t say “howdy” with a straight face. It strikes my ear like a cartoonish contrivance, more at home in the mouth of the animatronic cowboy at the state fair. “Y’all,” on the other hand, I have adopted as if it were my birthright. Why have I embraced the most identifiable word in the Southern dialect? Y’all does more than fill the gap where a separate second-person plural pronoun would go. Y’all also filled the empty place in my heart that came from not having grown up among Texans.
Y’all could be the most well-traveled word through time and space. It has appeared in the dialects of Scots-Irish immigrants and enslaved Africans. Y’all arrived in Texas in 1856—in the novel The Rangers and Regulators of the Tanaha, or Life Among the Lawless—spawning the much-apostrophied “y’all’s” two years later. In 1886, The New York Times did not celebrate y’all—take that as you will—calling the word “one of the most ridiculous of all the Southernisms I can call to mind.”
I mean, y’all.
Y’all can soothe tensions with an implied plural principle. It used to be a matter of controversy whether y’all could refer to one person. The 1962 book The Regional Vocabulary of Texas put it this way: “If anything is likely to lead to another Civil War, it is the Northerner’s accusation that Southerners use you all to refer to only one person.”
But consider the softening effects of y’all when broaching a touchy subject. Y’all adds a cushion of courtesy when connoting respect. Consider the child sent to the store while the rest of the family unloads the moving van. “Y’all just moved to town?” asks the shopkeeper, implicitly telling the little one that they might be alone in a strange place, but they’ve got people in this world. Now, no less a highfalutin expert as the Oxford English Dictionary says y’all is used to address one person “especially in polite or friendly statements.”
Unlike pedestrian contractions, the emphasis falls on the second word, imbuing y’all with rounded warmth. Y’all is less loutish than “youse,” more inclusive than “you guys,” more useful than “you’uns” (reserved for kin), more mellifluous than the Scots-Irish “yinz” in use in Ohio and western Pennsylvania, and more fun than the simple “you.”
At long last, y’all has finally charmed even the Times, which two years ago called it “the most inclusive of all pronouns.” In its grammatical inseparability, y’all has provided Texas a beacon to the world and our better selves, bridging our divides to include not just y’all but the triumphant redundancy of all y’all.
There isn’t anything friendlier than that.
—Jason Stanford