friday

What's a Yat?
"Yat" is a term for the quintessential neighborhood New Orleanian. It's derived from the local greeting, "Where y'at!", although it tends not to be used by locals in the way it's used by outsiders. I never really heard the term while growing up, and neither did many of my fellow New Orleanians. It's come into casual acceptance, although the acknowledged expert on local speech, Bunny Matthews, hates the word and considers it a pejorative. Bunny told me he though that it's "the kind of thing that a Tulane student from the Northeast would come up with." Personally, I don't think Tulane students from the Northeast were that clever, but I respect Bunny's thoughts on the matter.
Many if not most New Orleanians will use a few, some or all of the terms below, but not all New Orleanians employ the truly hardcore local pronunciations. A brief explanation of what constitutes the true essence of local speech and its users is offered here, excerpted from Tim Lyman's introduction to Bunny Matthews' wonderful first book of comic strips featuring New Orleans dialogue, F'Sure!: Actual Dialogue Heard on the Streets of New Orleans, now sadly out of print. In a bit of double irony, not only is Tim not a local (Bunny describes him as a "Yankee"), but Bunny himself refuses to use the word "Yat" to describe either locals or their speech. Still, it's one of the best descriptions of localness I've ever read:
For those of you unfamiliar with New Orleans culture, a good place to start is that there are basically only two kinds of people in New Orleans.
The first is those folks that live, as one [of Bunny's] cartoon characters puts it, in Gatorland -- "Yeah, you know ... ova dere across Magazine where dey all wear dem shoits wid lil' gators on 'em." Otherwise knows as Uptown, you can tell folks from Gatorland in the cartoons because they speak English. Another clue is that all skinny people are from Gatorland, although not all people from Gatorland are skinny. And they often have 59 rows of teeth.
The other kind of New Orleanian is Everyone Else, dose folks dat talk normal. Be they Black, White or Creole, whether they live right in the backyards of Uptown or way out in da Ninth Ward, Chalmette, or even across da River, they are united in the fact that their homes and lives have not been renovated, that life is the same as it's always been, only worse.
The best generic term for Everyone Else is "Yat", a word too often limited by its etymology so that it refers merely to those who greet you with "Where y'at?" most often. Yat is actually much broader than this; it is a state of mind.