I fear that I have sinned against my heritage.

Recently, as I was leaving a group of people, I said, “You guys have a great day.”

“You guys?”

That was wrong on several levels. In the first place, several of the people in the group were not “guys” by Damon Runyon’s definition. When I was growing up, “guys” was gender specific and didn’t apply to what we erroneously called “the weaker sex.”

But that wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was that “you guys” isn’t something that someone with three hundred years of Southern blood bubbling in his veins should be saying. We have a perfectly good word for the inclusive second-person plural: y’all.

All my life I have had an identifiable Southern accent, and periodically I lived in places where I got kidded for it. As a child I spent time in Philadelphia where it was obvious that I wasn’t from around there. As an adult I’ve spoken to groups with audiences from all over the country, some of whom commented on what they sometimes termed my “southern drawl.”

I never bothered to defend the way I talked. It was what it was, and if other people wanted to speak in harsh accents with chopped off words, I didn’t mind. However, my lapse has led me to want to do something to defend the language I grew up with. And maybe correct some misunderstandings.

The first one is that no Southerner would use “y’all” in speaking to one person. The correct word the second person singular (as it has been for the last several hundred years) is “you,” unless, of course, you’re a Quaker. “Y’all” is an inclusive, plural pronoun meaning “all of you.” And it’s not pronounced “you all,” but “y’all.” Just one syllable.

Secondly, there is no Southern drawl. There are a whole bunch of them. It seems that the accent, like barbecue, changes about every fifty miles. Mine comes from Eastern North Carolina, and just to the northeast of us on the coast near the Virginia border, you find the “oot and aboot” variety. And in the mountains of North Carolina it’s very different.

When I went off to school in the mountains I was assigned a roommate named Creed Jackson who was from deep in the North Carolina mountains, an area later made famous among linguists for speaking nearly pure Elizabethan English. It took me a week before I could understand Creed. Unfortunately, at the end of two weeks he decided he didn’t care for Western Carolina, college in general, or me, went home and didn’t come back. I had to start all over.

Anybody with a decent ear can hear the difference between North Carolina accents and those from Mississippi or Alabama. It takes a better ear to tell what part of each of those states the accent comes from.

The third thing is that we don’t necessarily talk more slowly than folks in the north. In fact, my speech is about 25% faster than a normal person’s, no matter whether they’re from the north or the south. For most people this wouldn’t make a lot of difference; however, it has been the bane of announcers for years. I’d write a 30-second radio spot, read it in 30 seconds, hand it to the announcer, and it’d be nearly 35 seconds long. We’d try to get it into 30 seconds a few time, then give up and start cutting copy. And I would be muttering, “I could read it.”

It’s not that we talk more slowly. It’s that our words have no edges. They glide from one to another, connecting words and sentences. I like to think of it as graceful. I’ve been told it sounds lazy. I guess one person sees the rose and another sees the thorn.

But these things over touch on the most superficial aspects of the Southern accent. It goes much deeper. There is, for instance, the use of archaic forms. When I was young, it wasn’t unusual to hear a farmer say that he was going to “hope his neighbor.” At least that’s what it sounded like. It wasn’t until I was involved in what the professor told me was the absolutely essential course in Pre-Shakespearean drama that I learned that the farmer was actually saying “holp,” and that was a perfectly good English word for “help.” It was just three hundred years out of date.

Then there were some things that pretty much defied explanation. For instance, you could hear a mother say to a small child: “Do you want a pretty, good?” Translated from the Southern, it means, “Would you like a toy, my dear child?”

It’s one of the tragedies of our age that, because of mobility and television, regional differences are disappearing. They haven’t yet; I still use PowerPoint when I’m doing a seminar or giving a speech—sort of English subtitles for the Yankees in the audience. And I still read authors who write graceful southern speech without resorting to dialect and making it sound like Huckleberry Finn. But, by the time my city-born and city-bred grandchildren are grown, the Southern accent will probably be gone. Even now my grandson’s speech patterns sound more like British English than Southern English.

But by then there will be few left to mourn the passing.

That’s the reason I almost choked when I realized I had said, “You guys.” In an infinitesimally small way I had hastened the demise of a wonderful tradition.

I confess. But because I’m Protestant, I really have no one to confess to or to prescribe a proper penance.

So I guess I’ll just go and say a dozen “y’alls” and six “Bless your hearts.”