[noise]

I promise I will actually write again before December when I fail at Holidailies again, but this doesn’t really count as an entry.  This entry has been approximately 16 years in the pipeline.  The time has come.

Yeah – informal for “yes:, does not rhyme with anything I can currently think of.  Usage:  “Yeah, I’m going to need you to come in on Saturday.”  Some may make a case for the usage “Yeah!  It’s your birthday!” but the truth is that the correct usage in that case is “Yay!” so let’s just stop that right now and move on if you are speaking to someone over the age of, say, four, as it can be assumed that they know it is their birthday and do not need your confirmation of such.

Yay – a word of celebration, or, sarcastically, of the lack thereof.  Another version of “hurray!”  Rhymes with pay, day, way, and hurray.  Usage:  “Yay!  It’s my birthday!”  or “I have to work on Saturday.  Yay.”

Yah – a mostly useless word, though one could argue that this is appropriate spelling for an exclamation used to make cattle move.  Rhymes with “Ma”, and possibly other things depending on where you’re from.

Ya – 1. preferred The word “you” spelled to indicate dialect.  Usage:  “Good on ya, mate.”  2. See above: encouraging cattle to move.

Ja – a word meaning “yes” in a number of Scandinavian languages.  Pronounced the same as Ya and Yah.

I feel like we have nearly eradicated the continuous use of all caps (not completely, I saw it just today on a gardening forum), and I feel that the internet is now mature enough to tackle this much more complicated issue.

Thank you for your time.