You Guys

The second person plural personal pronoun has always been a problem in the English language simply because officially it's the same as the second person singular personal pronoun - you. Most people use the word "you" to refer to another person, but the use of "you" to refer to a group of people has long gone by the wayside. Instead, most people use "you guys" to refer to a group of people. The problems with this is that "you guys" borders on the vulgar. I'm sure the first group of blue-haired old ladies who were approached by their waiter with the greeting - "How are you guys doing today?" - cringed. My mother, who was an English teacher is, I'm sure, turning over in her grave every time someone says "you guys" to refer to a group of people.

The word "guy" originated with a man by the name of Guy Fawkes who was part of a plot to kill King James and blow up both Houses of Parliament. The plot was detected, however, and Guy Fawkes was executed for treason. Guy Fawkes's failure is remembered with Guy Fawkes Night on November 5.

There has always been a tendency to pluralize the word "you." I think the Southerners had it right when they referred to a group as "you all." It makes a lot of sense and isn't vulgar. I think everyone should adopt this, and we should make it an official part of the English language that the correct second person plural personal pronoun is "you all."

There have been other attempts to come up with a second person plural personal pronoun such as the Bronx version: "Youse." This makes some sense too as usually the plural of a word is formed by adding an "s." However, "youse" is considered very vulgar while "you all" is quite stylish, I think.

The whole "you guys" thing culminated for me when I attended a wedding recently at which the minister repeatedly refered to the bride and groom as "you guys." I thought, "How gross!" Surely, we can do better than that as a language.

I'm not the only one having this conundrum. Dr. Carol J. Burger, Associate Professor at Virginia Tech has this to say:

The correct usage in Chicago [where I grew up] is "youse guys."  Try as I might, I cannot seem to eradicate this term from my vocabulary. Since I have been in the South for over 25 years, I have tried to substitute "y'all" but in times of crisis [like at the end of class when I'm trying to remind the students of an assignment], youse guys always slips out.   Maybe some aversion therapy with electroshock would be useful..........?

Julie Armstrong agrees with me:

I nominate "y'all" as a perfect feminist solution to two problems: the English language's lack of a plural "you," and the related issue of trying to create a plural "you" using gender-specific words like "you guys." Or worse, "gals" and "girls." Southerners out there who want to retain their distinctiveness from the Yankee hordes who might soon defect to our linguistic side can always retain rights to my favorite bit of inclusive terminology: "all y'all."

The American Heritage Dictionary shed the most light on the subject:

The single most famous feature of Southern United States dialects is the pronoun y'all, sometimes heard in its variant you-all. You-all functions with perfect grammatical regularity as a second person plural pronoun, taking its own possessive you-all's (or less frequently, your-all's, where both parts of the word are inflected for possession): You-all's voices sound alike. Southerners do not, as is sometimes believed, use you-all or y'all for both singular and plural you. A single person may only be addressed as you-all if the speaker implies in the reference other persons not present: Did you-all [you and others] have dinner yet? You and you-all preserve the singular/plural distinction that English used to have in thou and ye, the subject forms of singular and plural you, respectively (thee and you were the singular and plural object forms). The distinction between singular thou/thee and plural ye/you began to blur as early as the 13th century, when the plural form was often used for the singular in formal contexts or to indicate politeness, much as the French use tu for singular and familiar “you,” and vous for both plural and polite singular “you.” In English, the object form you gradually came to be used in subject position as well, so that the four forms thou, thee, ye, and you collapsed into one form, you. Thou and thee were quite rare in educated speech in the 16th century, and they disappeared completely from standard English in the 18th. However, the distinction between singular and plural you is just as useful as that between other singular and plural pronoun forms, such as I and we. In addition to y'all, other forms for plural you include you-uns, youse, and you guys or youse guys. Youse is common in vernacular varieties in the Northeast, particularly in large cities such as New York and Boston, and is also common in Irish English. You-uns is found in western Pennsylvania and in the Appalachians and probably reflects the Scotch-Irish roots of many European settlers to these regions. You guys and youse guys appear to be newer innovations than the other dialectal forms of plural you. See Note at you-uns.

Evidently, we have a subconscious need to pluralize the word "you." However, "you guys" is not used in England (except by Tony Blair) as it's considered too American. They prefer "fellow," "bloke," or "chap." Since we've lost the old forms of English in which there was a distinction between the singular and plural forms of "you," we've been wandering in the wilderness searching for a plural form of "you" with the result that we don't have a polite form of you plural but only an informal form verging on the vulgar: "you guys."