0% Dixie? I didn't know that could be done. I pity you, Mitch, I really do. Should I send you a Pogo Possum book?

Mitch, I got the same response, but i'm not (nor have I ever been) in radio. Keep up the good work. We are proud of you and the NARN!

"Y'all"? No way! Everybody knows that the proper English second person plural pronoun is "youse" or "yuz."

Let's go back to early modern English and use "thee" and "thou" for the singular and "you" for the plural. Might make for a more polite society. Works for the Friends.

A good quiz for readers of political blogs:

http://www.politicalcompass.org/

It plots your political leanings on a quadratic map.

That's pretty funny - mine is almost completely the opposite of yours - except I am 70% Yankee. I've got 0% Dixie too.

70% Yankee here and damn proud of it!

Let me see if I can interpret for you, Red:

"Youse f'um da Noad-East, youse doan' tawk da same English we in FLAI-ovah land do. Youse make da woid "Tool" inta a two-syllable woid; "TOO-ul". Weeahd.

But tanks fo yoah res-SPOAH-nse."

My Yankee is a little rusty, but we'll see.

70% General, 25% Yankee, 5% Upper Midwestern.

I must say that I was distressed at the lack of "soda pop" as a choice, though.

Terry: You do realize that "thee" and "thou" are familiar and "you" is formal, I hope. If you read German, you can see similarities in the verb endings: "Thou shouldst":"Du sollst", "You should":"Sie sollen"

Mitch: By the way, German uses the same word for singular and plural formal "you" as well, as I'm sure you know, though it obviously preserves other elements that have atrophied in English.

Oh, and "Y'all" serves as both singular and plural; "All y'all", on the other hand, is unambiguously plural. And Friday the 13th actually falls on a Friday next month. Make sure to clean under your beds.

Doug - now, I minored in German, and I could have sworn second-person plural formal was "Ihr". "Ihr sollt 'was tun..."

Someone confirm that for me, bitte sehr..."

I came up 75% General Am. Eng. too, with a surprising 10% Upper Midwest and 10% Dixie. I didn't think my 11 years in Florida (where everybody's from the north anyway) made that much of an impact. But that radio training will homogenize you every time.

"Ihr" is the familiar second person plural familiar. "Sie" (capital 'S' regardless of position) is the formal second person singular or plural.

I understand that some of this differentiation is preserved in the archaic familiar in English, but the exact usage seems to have changed several times between Old, Middle, and Early Modern English.

Another clarification, thought of just after clicking "Post":

For those not familiar with German, the pronouns "sie", "sie", and "Sie" correspond to "she", "they", and "You" (formal). In many cases, German is more regular and clear than English*; this is not one of them.

*English is broadly more expressive, but the concept of a "spelling bee" is pretty much foreign to German, because the orthography so directly represents the speech. There are only a very few cases where a sound can be represented by more than one spelling or a spelling can represent more than one sound.

I was disappointed to not see a question on the contentious "duck, duck, grey duck" versus "duck, duck, goose" controversy.

Doug-
I think the usage of thee, thou, and you in English has drifted from German. Or they've both drifted from some original usage. English is closer to Low German than High German at any rate. Have you read Chaucer? He has some of his more rustic characters say "dostow" as a contraction of "do'est thou".
I read somewhere that the Quakers purposely use "thee" and "thou" rather than "you" because it was the habit of English aristocrats in the 17th century to use the 1st person "thee" when speaking with each other and the plural "you" when addressing a single commoner.
And what is the difference between "thee" and "thou" anyway? I believe "thee" is nominative and "thou" is objective but the online dictionaries I've looked at give conflicting usages. Whatever sounds more pleasing I guess.

The English language has drifted enough that the thous and thees of the King James Bible today sound formal, when it was really the everyday colloquial speech of the man on the street in the 1600s.