Grama girl here. I'm Minion Fogarty and this week I have a quick and dirty tip about the

commonly confused words, yay, yay, YA, YA, yeah and yes. I have a meeting middle about

putting two spaces after a period and we'll see why English is a Spanish omelet.

Two of my friends, Trent Armstrong, the former modern manners guy, and Hi-at-Bass, the

author of the novel The Embers, asked about the word yay, YA, YA, and why people often

seem to incorrectly use yay, YA, or yeah instead. Y-A-Y is an exclamation that shows

feelings such as excitement, joy, happiness, triumph, and approval. The origin is fuzzy, though.

Some dictionaries say it came from yeah, but most seem to think it evolved from the

adverbial yay in the phrases yay big and yay high. But then the Oxford English Dictionary

says that the yay, YA, YA, in yay high probably came from yay YA and you wonder why people

are confused. But no matter where it came from, the first example sentence for YA, YA,

in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1963 and it is fabulous. Here it is. He talks

surfy talk, Kawabanga, wipe out. I'm getting stoked, yay, Grammys! And Grammys are young

or inexperienced surfers who are often annoying. It comes from Gremlins. But back to yay. Y-E-A

is a much older word that can be traced all the way back to old English and has parallels

in all the Germanic languages. It's another way of saying yes or indeed. It can be an adverb

as in squiggly loved the chocolate, yay he reminisced about it for weeks. Or it can

be a noun as in, artvark was one of 30 yays in favor of limiting access to the lake.

Today most people use this kind of yay when they're talking about voting. Finally, YA is

an informal way of saying yes that was being used in America by the early 1900s. YA is

still labeled as informal or colloquial in many dictionaries. And some manners guides

and articles on professionalism advise readers that YA is sloppy and yes is the only

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