Yo… & …yo

I don’t think that John McWhorter’s “YO!” has really “floated to the ends of sentences and lost its shouting intonation, and … become what linguists would call a pragmatic marker.” It’s just like football: there are always a few pragmatic markers hanging around on the margins of matches, and then there are Dutch defenders who shove their “YO!” in your face, in your shins, at the beginning of the sentence, as it were:

Who do I have to bribe to ensure that “Dutch” becomes redefined as an antonym of “pragmatic”?

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