Fixing the English language, or not?

Last updated on: June 12, 2015 at 10:16 am by Jane the Actuary

Fixing the English language, or not? 2015-06-12T10:16:13-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Here’s your flaky PC complaint for the day: “‘you guys’ is sexist because it excludes women.” (From Vox, with commentary and comments at Althouse.)

The author’s suggested replacements:

Friends
Folks
Everyone
Colleagues
Gang
Team
Y’all
Guys and girls

Yes, this is silly.

You know what, to me, the most common instance of “you guys” is?

“Hi, I’m Mike. I’ll be your server. How are you guys tonight? Can I get you guys something to eat while you look at the menu?”

“You guys” is the second person plural in American (non-Southern) English. I don’t know what they say in England, or Canada, or Australia, but presumably they’ve got another way of making up for the lack of such a pronoun there, too.

And, yes, in various contexts, you could swap something else: waiters often use “you folks” instead (though there’s some regionalism there; my parents use it exclusively to refer to one’s parents); in other contexts you might say, “you all” (but never y’all). And the possessive form sometimes, depending on region, becomes “you guys’s.”

Of course, once upon a time, we did have such a pronoun — it was “you.” But it was also the formal version of the pronoun, as in French, with the thees and thous being the informal pronoun, which got dropped. Do we need to resurrect it? Heck, German has formal and informal, singular and plural — but they also have the ambiguity of the fact that “sie” is third person singular, female (“she”) and third person plural (they), and Sie (capitalized) is the formal pronoun for both.

(How do you keep straight what the original meaning of thee and thou was? I recall that the Lord’s Prayer is “Hallowed be thy name” — which in German is “dein Name,” informal; in fact, it’s kind of funny that, in the German mass, all the parts of the mass use the informal version of the pronoun, e.g., “und mit deinem Geiste” = “and with your/thy Spirit”, but then when the priest gives his homily or there are after-mass announcements, it’s Sie/formal all the way. But that’s a tangent.)

And that is, of course, the trouble with language. On the one hand, yes, it evolves. But you can’t demand its evolution from On High.

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