I get the whole “The way I are” thing. Sure, “are” doesn’t agree with the subject, according to standard American English morphology, which specifies the following paradigm for the verb “be” in the present tense:
| sg | pl | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | (I) am | (we) are |
| 2 | (you) are | (you) are |
| 3 | (he/she/it) is | (they) are |
So I can understand that you might level the paradigm to be uniform “are” for all person/number combinations. But the most peculiar thing seems to occur in this song (Timbaland’s “The Way I Are”, incase that wasn’t clear):
I’m about to strip and I’m well equipped
Can you handle me the way I’m are?
Emphasis mine. “I’m are”? WHAT? Where’d that second “be” come from?!
I wonder if this is genuine dialect, or if it’s intentional ungrammaticality for the sake of repeating the “are” from previous lines.
Comments (2)
This reminds me of the structure: “aren’t I?”, I think I’ve heard about it from one of my English teachers… and I’ve always wondered, how that can be grammatical :) I’d prefer if “ain’t” made it to the standard.
“Aren’t I?” atleast has only one verb. If you want, you can just analyze “aren’t” as a single word specially for Y/N questions, syncretic with other forms. Not terribly complicated, really.