They’re just being funny, because it sounds so strange.
No one would use “folks” or “y’all” here in NYC unless they were originally from the South. Everyone uses “guys” to refer to mixed groups as well as women-only groups, and no one cares. It’s completely a gender-neutral word in this area. Has been for decades.
Maybe so. It wouldn’t be the first time I haven’t gotten a joke.
Yeah, this is the case with me and my wife.
Yesterday we were at a restaurant with a little play area outside for kids. While I was eating, I saw a kid running up to a group of his friends (boys and girls) and shout: “HEY YOU GUYS!”
My three your old daughter also says “you guys” quite a lot.
So I think regardless of our personal opinions, this battle has been lost for the next generation - “you guys” is fully gender neutral now.
Hell, the battle was probably lost when I was a kid. I remember that all the Disney/Nickelodeon shows routinely had girls calling groups of girls “you guys”.
…and maybe some women aren’t “used to it”, but rather view it as gender neutral, and always have.
I asked my wife how her family started calling her “dude”; she told me that actually they used to call her and both of her sisters “dude”, and the girls calling each other “dude” is what started it - the parents picked it up from them.
She isn’t browbeaten into begrudging acceptance. She’s used the term (dude in this case, but this applies to “you guys” too) in a fully gender neutral way since she was a little kid. Language changes, and “dude” wasn’t something that was thrust on her and her sisters; it was something they picked up naturally.
That’s not a micro aggression. It’s not aggression at all.
Then they mean different things in different contexts.
I’d be a lot more likely to say “you guys” to a group at a college campus than a group at a nursing home.
I object to being called “dude” and I’m a guy..uh, man.
This is what bothers me, rather than any particular term. But it’s far from English-specific. I know all the romance languages use male terms for mixed groups, and there is usually no neutral option. I’m confident the causation here flows from common psychology/beliefs to language and not the other way around, and don’t know how to change it or if it even can be changed.
Incidentally, this is how the aforementioned 90s/2000s shows that say “you guys” a lot were dubbed in Hebrew: guys was replaced with friends. But it sounded incredibly unnatural to me - no one walks around saying “Come on, friends!” outside of a children’s song about skipping in puddles or something. Although “Khevre” is an abbreviated form of “Khaverim” that would sound much more natural there - don’t know why none of the dubbing studios ever translated it that way.
“Guys” is a word I’ve thought about in the past - but not enough to care to try to change. As others have said, I think it was driven into me as non-gendered from my Chicago in the 60s-70s. I have 3 sisters, and we all refer to each other as “guys” (tho I am in the mix when they say it.) I play music in a group with 2 women. That is where I think about it - but I’ve asked, and they don’t care.
At one point my wife and daughters hammered into me that I oughtn’t. say “ladies” at work. At that point, they said “Why use any term? Just say, ‘Hi’, not ‘Hi, ladies.’” So that would likely be the best option IMO, rather than looking for another term. When is “guys” needed, rather than simply “you” or “them”?
As one who often preferred prescriptive language rules, I also wonder the extent to which the non-gendered “guys” simply reflects a descriptive change in usage. If guys is used in a nongendered way, I question the efficacy of folk trying to urge a different usage.
This also impresses me as someone taking offense when the speaker really doesn’t care about them one way or another. I would wager the speaker of “guys” generally just means “you people.” If they knew you were offended, they would likely have more definite, and less neutral thoughts about you. Of course, that is from someone who is generally happy to remain invisible and anonymous - admittedly a beneficiary of male privilege who generally thinks most other people don’t give a damn about me, and who is not bothered by that.
Why wouldn’t high school girls be ok with it when they’ve heard it used in the gender neutral way their entire lives?
I see ‘guys’ used by both genders to address all sorts of groups, and so philologically I think we’re past it being anything other than an address to the general mass, but I also try to be careful about it, knowing it might bother some. And that botheration seems reasonable to me.
Everyone I knew in college in the early 80s referred to each other as ‘dude’ in a generic way. That one always struck me as odder, but I got used to it, and now use it indiscriminately within family.
Hopefully yinz followed all that.
I find it amusing to overhear my teenage daughter and her (girl) cousin calling each other “bro”, although it seems to fall into a formulaic usage (essentially, punctuation at the end of a sentence, and pitched so that it seems intentional and ironic).
Gendered and genderfree forms of address are tools, and the number one rule of communication is to know your audience and choose your tools appropriately.
Not to mention Husband, which means Master of the House in Norse, and from which the root Husbandry comes, referring to careful management of resources. Gotta love those implications…
One of the new generation of really little kid shows is Lucas the Spider, which has a character - Bhodi - who is a female chameleon who’s into extreme sports and calls everyone “bro” and “dude”.
Unfortunately or fortunately, prescriptivism in language almost never works, even in languages other than English that have an official body deciding what is or isn’t “proper”. With a language like English, that has no such thing - all hope is lost.
Well, who would you rather run into in the woods? A baby goat, or a man?
If everyone was careful about how they speak, we’d all be speaking perfect Latin instead of a degraded pidgin tongue like English.
Yes, calling groups of people “guys” is exactly like kissing women without their consent. Do you want to tell my wife that she’s basically a rapist because she says “you guys” and “dude”, or should I?
I was in college close to then, but never heard women called dude. As I recall, it was pretty much of a stoner/surfer/black usage/referent. Struck me as curious when I heard young women call each other dude/bro much later.
After more thought, I think what bothers me is that “guys” is a male word that has become acceptable to use to refer to a group of men and women. It isn’t truly a gender-neutral word.
If someone asked “are you gay or straight” and I answered “I like guys,” no one interprets that as being bisexual.
So it’s one more thing that reinforces that “male” is the default, and if there are both men and women in a group, we can just ignore the women.
Everyone arguing that it’s proper usage, it’s normal, people of all ages do it – I agree 100%. My point is that it’s disappointing, and I wish we did better.
I think it would be weird and a little dehumanizing to ask, “do females object to being called ‘guys’.” Female what? Female chickens? No, I’m pretty sure they are indifferent to what words you use. And no one would ask, “do males object to being called ‘ladies’? " (That’s the most common " female-coded” term that I’ve heard applied to men. Usually in a restaurant, with a group of women and one long-haired guy, and the server comes up and says someone like, “can i get you ladies anything?”)
Honestly, except in conversations like this one, i rarely find the need to separate people verbally by gender. I’ll use males and females sometimes, but they are words i try to avoid as nouns, unless I’m taking about animals.
Same here. Don’t make me cite Steven Tyler to back that up.
In fairness I was in Austin around a lot of stoners (male and female), so who knows what that was. Mighta been ironic.