My intention for this post was to take a brief respite from the serious (understatement of the year), news of the day. What after all could be less serious than the word "guy"? It's the very definition of casual non-commitment, a word describing someone not distinctive, but rather ordinary, mediocre and average. After all he's just a guy.
Little did I know there are people who take the subject of the contemporary uses of the word deadly serious. I'll get to that in a bit.
Like casual words or expressions in any language, its precise etymology is not one hundred percent certain, but the common explanation is that guy derives from a historical figure, Guy Fawkes. If you don't happen to be British, you still may have heard of him as he is ironically memorialized every year by the holiday bearing his name that takes place on November 5. Fawkes was a 17th Century English Roman Catholic mercenary who participated in a plan to assassinate King James I in order to restore a Catholic monarch to the British throne.
In the plan, not only was the king to be done away with, but so was the entire Parliament and the lion's share of British nobility. The deed was to be carried out by the detonation of 36 barrels of dynamite positioned in a room directly beneath the chamber of the House of Lords on the Fifth of November 1605, coinciding with the State opening of Parliament. This "Gunpowder Plot" was thwarted when Fawkes was discovered among the barrels of dynamite, ready to light the match.
As you can imagine, Fawkes and seven co-conspirators met ignominious ends, they were all sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered, the standard punishment for treason at the time. Their immortality was sealed however by the British government who decreed that the failure of the Gunpowder Plotters would be commemorated every year as a national day of Thanksgiving, which continues to this day.
The celebrations are more like American Fourth of July than our Thanksgiving, featuring rowdiness, fireworks and bonfires which consume life-size effigies of Guy Fawkes and any other unpopular figures of the day. The effigies became known as guys. Eventually the meaning of "guy" would expand to be used as a pejorative term referring to men of shall we say, less than stellar attributes.
The word guy made the Atlantic voyage to the New World where, shed of its original context, came to be used a generic term for men. That is to say, in our egalitarian society, you could either be a good guy or a bad guy.
But wait friends, there's more!!!
If you're a native English speaker learning your first foreign language, you've no doubt noticed several grammatical concepts in the new language that are well, foreign to you. You may even be tempted to believe that the language you're studying is a bit strange. It's only when you start learning a second and third foreign language when you realize that in fact, English is the peculiar language.
Take for example the second person, personal pronoun.
Many languages use different pronouns depending upon whom you are speaking to. If you are addressing a friend, family member, or child, you most likely would be using the familiar pronoun. If not, you would address the person with the formal pronoun. The line between the two varies from culture to culture, adding extra confusion when learning a new language along with the different cultures where it is spoken.
Most languages distinguish between the second person singular and the second person plural . In other words, if you are addressing one person, you would use the singular pronoun. If you're addressing more than one person, you'd use the plural pronoun.
English does not have any of these distinctions; we have only one word that covers all the options, "you".
Compare that to Spanish. In Spain, they have four words for you:
- tú - translation: you, singular, familiar.
- usted - translation: you, singular, formal.
- vosotros - translation: you, plural, familiar.
- ustedes - translation: you, plural, formal.
In Latin American Spanish, they've dropped vosotros so there is just one second person plural pronoun, ustedes, making life there a bit simpler, in that sense anyway.
Regardless, in Spanish and most languages of the world, there is no ambiguity between addressing one person, or a group of people.
In English, we have to rely on context to distinguish between the singular and the plural you. We also have ways of speaking which distinguishes between formal and informal speech, usually by the use of certain words.
Enter the word "guy". In American English, "guy," by making it plural and preceded with a "you" makes it function as a pronoun, sometimes.
In other words, "you guys" has become the go-to plural familiar second person pronoun, or if you prefer, the vosotros of American English.
Here's an example, if I were telling friends that I plan to accompany them to the store I might say:
Voy de compras con vosotros (in Spanish Spanish) = I'm going shopping with you guys. (in American English).
"You guys" obviously is plural, and it's also informal, you probably wouldn't address strangers who are older than you as "you guys".
But wait a minute folks, you ain't heard nothin' yet!!!
In the last God knows how many years, at least in this context, "you guys" has evolved to become gender-neutral. It can refer to males, females, or any combination of both, just like vosotros.
However the gender-neutral "guys" is used in another manner which differs from vosotros, that is, in greetings.
In English if you walked into a room filled with friends you might say informally: "Hey guys." whereas in Spanish you wouldn't say "Hola vosotros", at least I've never encountered it.
Instead you might say something like: "Hola chicos" or in Italian, "Ciao ragazzi", which both literally translate to "hi boys." If it were a room filled with women you might say: "Hola chicas" or "Ciao ragazze", literally "hi girls". What if the room is filled with men and women? Spanish and Italian both default to the male-centric "Hola chicos" and "Ciao ragazzi" respectively, even if the crowd is comprised of one thousand women and only one man. That might be changing at least in some circles. One fix is being more inclusive by saying "Hola chicos y chicas" for example, or "Ciao ragazzi e ragazze" which can be a bit cumbersome, especially in an informal context.
By contrast, "guys" has no generally accepted contemporary female counterpart. Probably the closest is gals (once-upon-a-time filling the bill), which sounds to my ears hopelessly antiquated, although some folks are trying to bring it back.
It seems to me that our culture is striving to be ever more inclusive, gender-neutral and informal. In that vein, "you guys" would seem to be the perfect second person familiar pronoun.
Not everyone agrees.
I recently came across a 2018 article in The Atlantic called "The Problem With 'Hey Guys'". Apparently, some people don't find the gender-neutral "guys" to be acceptable. As the piece points out in its introduction:
it’s a symbol of exclusion—a word with an originally male meaning that is frequently used to refer to people who don’t consider themselves "guys."But the problem is that language seldom works as it should work, but rather how people want it to work. As I pointed out in another post, how else do you explain that the expression "I could care less" means the opposite of what the words indicate, and that we have to invent a new word for "literally" because literally, literally doesn't mean literally anymore.
The Atlantic article goes on to suggest some more PC, gender-neutral alternatives to "you guys", such as "friends", "folks", "people", "team", and the ever popular "you all", in speech typically shortened to "y'all".
The problem with these is they all fit into their own niche, carry some amount of baggage, and are not nearly as flexible as "you guys". For example:
- "Friends" has a disingenuous ring to it. It sounds like something that would come out of the mouth of a televangelist or a used car salesman.
- "Folks" implies that what follows is bad news such as: "I hate to tell you this folks, but your pet ferret has COVID."
- My father always used to address us with "hello people". As English was not his first language, I'm not quite sure what he intended to convey but "people" has a very authoritarian/dismissive ring to it as in: "What were you people thinking?"
- "Team" sounds like someone is trying too hard.
- "You all"/"y'all" both make perfect sense as both a greeting and as a plural pronoun. The problem is both are SO identified with the language of the American South and by extension, Black American English, that anyone who uses those terms and is not a member of either of those groups, sounds phony.
And on and on and on...
Which brings us back to "you guys".
Thanks in part to popular culture where so much of our casual speech originates, (think of the opening to the 1970s children's TV show The Electric Company featuring the great Rita Moreno), "you guys" has become enshrined in the American English Hall of Fame.
I think it's really going against the grain to not accept that in certain contexts, "you guys" has evolved into a truly gender-neutral term, just as it evolved centuries before from exclusively describing an object, to describing people.
As a generally accepted gender-neutral term, "you guys" has the advantage over its equivalents in other languages as we saw above, where you have to reverse engineer them in order to be inclusive, making them less informal in the process. And as we also saw, "you guys" has less baggage than its alternatives in English.
"You guys" has become so ingrained into our American English lexicon that whether we like it or not, it's going to be around for a very long time.
The other day at Thanksgiving I noticed my very proper (linguistically speaking) ninety something, former elementary school principal mother using "you guys" to address her equally persnickety eighty something female friends who found no offense in it.
Just try to pry that bone away from those formidable ladies, I dare you (guys).
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