What you and Merriam write about “guys” is just about exactly what was written about “he” and “him” in dictionaries in 1965 when I was child starting elementary school.
You may as well defend “he” as subsuming the female. The only difference is how far behind the times you are: 20 years or 40 years.
Not a hill I wish to die on, and any of us can be as blinkered, backwards, and curmudgeonly as we wish. For any reason or no reason.
The argument that “guys” / “you guys” is not gendered is simply laughable. What you (any you) are arguing is actually “It doesn’t sound excessively gendered to my old fashioned gender-insult insensitive ears.” To which I reply: “You do you. But don’t be surprised to experience adverse judgment for your choices.”
The question is, do dictionaries have the gender-neutral definition because they’ve caught up with contemporary usage, or is it because they’re stuck in the past? My anecdotal experience is that the number of times I’ve seen young women join a group with some variant of “hi, guys”, whether that group is mixed-sex or all women, suggests that the use is extremely prevalent. Also, Google Ngram says the prevalence of “guys” has increased greatly in the past 25 years, which is consistent with my anecdotal observation that women have been adopting it.
I think what’s outdated is the idea that “guys” shouldn’t be used in a gender-neutral fashion. Of course it depends on circumstances (it’s obviously very informal) and age is a factor, too. A waiter would certainly never inquire of a table of elderly female socialites, “are you guys ready to order?”. But if it’s a table of high school girls, it’s perfect! Because that’s how they talk.
The other thing that strikes me as outdated is that the attempt to discourage the gender-neutral “guys” smacks of just the kind of prescriptivism that many on this board hold in such disdain. If a large segment of the population is using it that way, then who is empowered to declare it wrong, or worse, declare it offensive to the very same folks who are using it themselves?
Here’s an article from WaPo that is unfortunately paywalled, but the headline and subhead gives you the gist. Lisa Selin Davis is a writer, essayist, and blogger on gender culture wars. When she says “We should celebrate when words lose their gendered connotations” she’s reflecting exactly my view that the gender-neutral “guys” should be considered empowering for women rather than some silly notion that it reflects some kind of male dominance.
It’s not laughable at all. “You guys” is the plural of “you” in my dialect. Women will say “Whatcha guys doin’?” to other women.
It’s not just my area:
Your logic is flawed. You’re attempting to force a level of logic onto language that doesn’t exist. He and guys aren’t the same word. He was gender neutral in academic and formal contexts, to avoid the “incorrect” singular they. And these contexts were dominated by men. “You guys” and even “guys” has been used in a gender neutral way forever.
Now is it impossible that things will change? Of course not. I have very rarely encountered a trans person online who assumes “guys” is gendered. And “y’all” is spreading, so “you guys” may fall more and more out of favor.
But it’s also possible that this is a “womyn” thing, where people decide it doesn’t matter.
As it is, I’m going to use what everyone else in my dialect uses. If it trends more towards “y’all,” that’ what I’ll use. But, for now, it’s still “you guys.”
The simplest solution is just to swap out “gals” for guys. When referring to any group–all women, all men, mixed gender, all nonbinary–just say, “Hey, Mike and Bob and Jason, are you gals coming with us to the MMA match?” “Gals” should be gender neutral.
“Guys” registers for me like a 4 on the 0-100 “sexist language” scale. But it’s not a zero. It’s certainly a common term and is used in a gender-neutral manner, but has some subtle connotation that I prefer to avoid. (“Dude” is like a 4.5).
Only to someone who doesn’t understand what “descriptivist” means. Nobody is claiming that “you guys” is grammatically wrong, which is as far as “descriptivist/prescriptivist” reaches. What’s being discussed here is fundamentally a question of manners, not grammar, and there’s no “descriptivist” position on manners.
Exactly right. And people who use it aren’t morons, and they’re not lazy, and they’re not bad at language, or any of the other stupid stuff that keeps getting thrown around. It’s just a usage with some connotations that I’d rather avoid.
If “guys” is at 4 on the 1-100 Offensiveness scale, “cocksuckers” (as a pejorative) is around 90. But the people that use it aren’t morons or lazy or bad at language, either. They’re just assholes.
Where I live and in my circle of friends and acquaintances (NYC, 30s-40s, various sexualities and gender expressions), I always hear women call groups of other women “guys.” No one uses “gals” in any context. That’s such an old fashioned word.
But apparently the men on this board want to dictate what women call each other.
Nah, I just listen to other people. You know of no women who have an issue with “guys”. Great. I know many women who are fine with it, and many women who find it slightly dismissive of women. As long as there are perfectly fine alternatives, I side with those who prefer something other than “guys”.
Nah. The only people I see complaining about it in here are men. Who are ignoring the women saying “actually we use it and it’s fine.” Funny how that is.
That has been pretty much my take until yesterday-ish.
I now find myself confronted by good evidence from @wolfpup and @BigT that I might be wrong / hyper-corrective about that. With “hyper-correct” being a reliable synonym for “wrong”.
Who are the women in this thread who have made that assertion? Serious question, not a gotcha. I have been paying attention, but sometime I miss something.
OTOH …
My own occupational experience addressing mixed gender groups new to me is probably wider than most folks. In that milieu there was enough gentle pushback on the collective “guys” that I switched to “folks” and got a bunch fewer disapproving glances and arms folded across chests. Or so it seemed.
It may well be that “guys”, very slightly akin to the much more potent n-word, can be safely used by the in-group (in this case women) to refer to one another happily, but it’s transgressive for outsiders (in this case men) to use it to refer to the same group.
I disagree, and I would question who it is that really doesn’t understand what “prescriptivism” means. I’ve added emphasis to the definition below:
Linguistic prescription, also called prescriptivism or prescriptive grammar, is the establishment of rules defining preferred usage of language. These rules may address such linguistic aspects as spelling, pronunciation, vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Sometimes informed by linguistic purism, such normative practices often propagate the belief that some usages are incorrect, inconsistent, illogical, lack communicative effect, or are of low aesthetic value, even in cases where such usage is more common than the prescribed usage. They may also include judgments on socially proper and politically correct language use. Linguistic prescription - Wikipedia
Furthermore, “manners” – in the general sense, not just about language – is fundamentally prescriptive. It tries to set out rules for “correct” or “polite” standards of behaviour based on various rationales that may or may not make sense. It exactly parallels linguistic prescriptivism, and when we make judgments about what we think a word means and whether or not it should be used, apparently heedless of how it’s actually being used out in the real world, we’re absolutely engaged in linguistic prescriptivism. Conversely, a statement like “guys isn’t a gendered word any more” is a descriptive empirical linguistic observation.
That’s not a valid analogy because “gals” has never been gender neutral anywhere on planet Earth, whereas whether you approve or not, “guys” in the plural form has been, and for a long time. “Gals” is also a word I don’t hear much any more, whereas for the past 25 years or so “guys” has seen a dramatic upsurge in usage.
I use “folks” because it is truly gender neutral, not just mostly gender neutral. It’s safer. I also think it sounds better.
One thing I always thought was weird; “fellow” as a noun just means any contemporary. A friend, colleague, acquaintance, or someone you just happen to be in proximity to. It’s gender neutral. But the variant pronunciation “fella” or “feller” seems to imply a male. I never understood that.
No, it’s just wrong. There are a lot of people who do consider it gendered. It may be a minority opinion, but a descriptivist understands that just because a usage is uncommon, does not make it incorrect.
“Manners” are a set of explicitly artificial rules designed to ease social interaction. They do not purport to describe a natural phenomenon. Saying that “manners” are “prescriptivist” is tautological. It’s like call chess “prescriptivist.” True, but so what?
The whole point of descriptivism is to get away from treating linguistics like manners. Language isn’t determined by artificially imposed rules, but by emergent rules arrived at by subconscious consensus. But there’s nothing in descriptivism that opposes teaching people how those rules work (grammar), or which sets of rules are best suited to which social contexts (manners). There’s no ironic contradiction in applying a descriptivist approach to emergent rule sets, and a prescriptivist approach to artificial rule sets.
We could argue forever about how common or uncommon the gender-neutral usage of “guys” is. That’s not the point I was making in that response. I was objecting to the accusation that I somehow “didn’t understand” what prescriptivism was when I said that disparaging the use of “guys” in the gender-neutral sense was linguistic prescriptivism. It absolutely is, because as in the definition I quoted, prescriptivism is not limited to edicts about grammar and it absolutely can include prescriptive judgments about things like social propriety.
But as for how common that usage is, as I said, I hear it all the time, and when a respected writer, essayist, and feminist with expertise in gendered language and the politics of gender nonconfomity tells us that “guys” has now fully evolved to be gender neutral, I’m inclined to believe her.
No, your point was quite clear, and it was made here where you expressed your reluctance to accept a very common and well-established meaning:
That’s fine. You do you. But you’re making a value judgment, not an empirical observation. If you’re making it for yourself, cool. If you’re making it for others, you’re being prescriptive and judgmental.
Maybe, but I don’t so, though this is just conjecture on my part. I won’t try to address the sociology of Blacks calling each other the n-word, but there’s definitely some significant social psychology going on there. Whereas “Hi, guys” is just cheerfully playful and IMHO has no greater significance than that. In an appropriately informal setting it sounds better than “ladies”, “gals”, “girls”, or “folks”. But “informal” is key here.
Here’s an interesting though distinctly non-scientific survey someone did that may shed some light on the nature of the disagreement here. The sample size was about 2300. In casual informal greetings like “Hey, guys” or “Hi, guys”, virtually everyone regarded “guys” as gender-neutral. The problem arises when “guys” is used in other sentence constructions. And I must acknowledge that when I said I hear it all the time in the gender-neutral sense, I was subconsciously thinking in the terms of greetings, not general speech.
The conclusion is that it’s undeniably gender-neutral in greetings and similar forms of address (“you guys”) but not when used in arbitrary sentences. “I’m going out with the guys” understandably had the lowest gender-neutral rating – almost everyone thought it was male gendered in that context. In retrospect it should have been obvious, but context is really important.
