As in “I’m tryna get the housework done fast…”
Am I the last person to find this out?
Sigh.
You encountered this in writing?
I’ve been known ta mangle the language some myself, but when I do I gotta say I’m doin’ it wit’ malice aforethought. (As distinct from ‘malice afore thought’.) I concede mild dismay at the ideer of a person writin’ like that serious-like.
Never encountered that. Gotta get out more, I guess.
Yes. I’m okay with it, but it took me a month to figure out what “bae” meant.
It was a black thing at first. Then as usual, white people stole it.
Or so, I’ve come to gather from Facebook.
“The way I figger,” Buck yawned, “She done it. Tryna make it look bad for Gay, mebbe.”
-Will Thomas, God is for White Folk, 1947
I don’t think I’ve ever seen it in writing, but, yeah, in rapid speech, my “trying to” comes out as either “tryin-uh” or “tryin-tuh,” depending. It’s not anything new as far as the way I talk is concerned. Been doing that my whole life (I’m in my 40s), as far as I know.
Them kids are finna confuse you.
Imma have to axk you to stop tryna figure it out. I finna get mad.
WHOA! That’s a year before I was born… okay. Not new exactly…
Here are examples in the Washington Post from the last year. That’s where I saw it in writing. All are quotes, which you can see from the google snippets. From these examples as well as Miller’s, it does seem to be black usage/dialect.
Wait, newspapers are using phonetic spelling in quotations now?
I assume most of them are quotes of tweets, where spelling like “tryna” is more common.
Those sounds you hear are fissures in the foundation of good usage in newspapers and the equivalent. Elsewhere I cited MSNBC for using “discrete” when it should have been “discreet.”
Discrete, of course, is a word. But it means something different from discreet.
I see a buncha these kinda spellings on texts from the lil’wrekker. I tend to pick them up. I really hate 'prolley ’ for ‘probably’, though.
I don’t see anything in those search results that aren’t quotes of tweets or lyrics (I only see 9 results). So those are properly quoted.
I’ve been saying something like tryina for as long as I can remember (which is a good long time). Just like wanna, gonna, cooda, and shooda.
Interestingly, the sentences “This is the man I wanna succeed” has a completely different meaning from “This is the man I wanta succeed” though they are both from the ambiguous “This is the man I want to succeed”.
It’s a text-speak thing. You see it all over twitter. It’s how I talk but I find it jarring in print.
Also, when you see something cute, it’s no longer “aw” or “awwww”, it’s “awe”. :rolleyes:
I’ve used “imma” in casual written language for a while.
I like to think that for all his ego, that will actually be Kanye’s legacy to mankind.
I’ve also noticed “I ain’t tryna” (in SAE, “I am not trying to”) means the slightly different “I am trying to avoid”… as in “I ain’t tryna hit that car”.
Language is interesting!
In my British accent it’s tryunta. I don’t know if that makes it any better 