Karero wrote:"You lot" is something I use quite often when translating second person plurals, though it feels to me more like a northern thing. I can't imagine it appearing in the speech of, say, a Scot. "You all", on the other hand, sounds awfully American, and I think it stuck out for me when we were doing To Kill a Mockingbird at school.
Is "you lot" really as neutral as "you all"? It's always had a slightly deprecatory tinge to me (as a native speaker of American English).
"You all" (or, rather, "y'all") used to be heavily marked as Southern and nonstandard in this country, but it's become more mainstream over the last decade or so--surprisingly so, I would say. I now hear it from people who haven't ever spent time in the South and don't have any personal or professional ties to it.
Karero wrote:When I'm at school I'll often use "you people" to refer to my classmates when I converse with them, and they seem to take it as a sign of me seeing "myself" as being separate from "them",which it kind of is.
One has to be careful with "you people" in the USA. For speakers who naturally have "y'all" as their preferred plural, it can have a racial dimension. That is, if I said it to a Black person, it could easily be taken to mean all Black people rather than just whatever particular group I'm associating that individual with at the moment.
Karero wrote:And now for something completely different. While watching
Flog It! on the TV, I heard the presenter Chris Martin utter the sentence "The auction room is in full swing," which jarred with me as I conceive the phrase "in full swing" as being applicable to events, not locations. I would thus render it as "the auction is in full swing". Anyone else noticed this or is this just a one-off.
That just strikes me as ordinary metonymy, using the physical location as a stand-in for the people in it or associated with it. See also "The room went wild", "The joint was jumping", etc.