Now Back to You Guys in the Studio

The way we address one another reveals our cultural and personal attitudes, our self-awareness, our sensitivity to others, even our social standing in relation to that of our interlocutors; for, as sociolinguists remind us, words never exist in isolation. It is also true that language, like all living creatures, is in a constant state of evolution, and most linguistic changes are initiated in the lower echelons of society and flow to the more resistant, less populated upper classes. Along with relaxations in rules of social etiquette that have occurred during the last fifty years, there has been a similar relaxation in what constitutes polite language behavior, especially in regard to forms of address. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, senators, teachers, graduate students, mothers, fathers, grandparents are now addressed as "you guys"; and though this leaves a portion of the population with the curious sensation of having been insulted, the designation seems firmly entrenched in American English.

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What is unique about you guys in its generic guise is that it can function as such only in its plural vocative form. For example, the referents in expressions such as "There's a guy at the door" or "I'm going out with the guys" are undoubtedly male, whereas the referents of "Hey you guys" might be a male or female. Whether its referents are male or female, you guys continues to grow in acceptance, even by those who reject terms such as mankind or generic he. Women or men who protest being addressed as guys are thought to be out of step, out of time, even elitist. Some, such as Sherryl Kleinman and Douglas Hofstadter, have tried to launch more public protests, but to date, few converts have signed on.

It's everywhere. "Back to you guys in the studio" is the new ten-four of morning and evening news programs; adult women call one another you guys; restaurant servers address patrons as you guys; professors call graduate students you guys. This paper seeks to analyze the reasons you guys has achieved its present height of popularity. To this end, thirty-eight women and twenty-two men responded to a questionnaire asking them to indicate the frequency with which they use the term as well as their reaction to being addressed as you guys in various social and professional settings. The ultimate purpose of the questionnaire was to determine whether people who include you guys in their regular cache of speech acts feel there are occasions for which it is inappropriate. This aspect of the research will be discussed later in the paper.

"Pataki's a real guy, a real man." (Former New York City mayor Rudi Giuliani in a television advertisement for New York Governor George Pataki)

Origins of Guy

The word guy is attributed to Guy Fawkes, the leader of the Gunpowder Plot of November 4, 1605, a failed conspiracy to explode London's Westminster Abbey. Every November, English citizens celebrate Guy Fawkes Day by burning grotesque effigies of him in cities and towns across the isle. Presumably, the yearly burning of Guy's effigies led to the formation of the eponym guy, and over the course of the succeeding 200 years, the term evolved as a reference to anyone with an odd or different appearance. In the United States, the word underwent more changes, even becoming a euphemism for God — guy darn it — and took on a more general meaning to include any single male human being. During the 1950s, the term was picked up by the first generation of television children, who never let go of it. Now, while the singular guy still refers to single male human being, its referents include inanimate objects, pets, children, amoebas. Its plural vocative form references all the above as well as female human beings.

"So what is you guys's relationship like?" (Jules Asner interviewing female pop star)

Generic Guise

Some are delighted with what they call this "new generic noun developing right before our eyes" (Clancy 283). They don't understand the furor over a word that is, by their thinking, not a substitute for man. After all, we don't say guykind or woguy's work is never done or the milk of huguy kindness or guy shall not live by bread alone. What's more, champions of guy also refute the gender exclusivity of the word man. The Old English word for male human being was not man, but wer; indeed, man meant man long before William the Conqueror inadvertently conquered the English language.

Nonetheless, historical linguists will agree that time and use are dedicated obliterators and transformers of meaning. Language must change if it is to continue living. Therefore, lexical sources don't determine current meaning; rather, their most recent incarnation carries the most import. To appreciate the rapidity with which primary meaning is lost, we need only look at the very recent transmogrification of a word such as awesome. Thirty years ago, awesome evoked images of the terrible power of god or nature. About twenty-five years ago, the qualifications for awesomeness were diluted by American teenagers; referents were no longer gods, but kaleidoscopic colors and media personalities. Now, even a peanut butter sandwich might qualify as awesome, and the original meaning is entirely lost, except in old writings.

The questionnaire revealed that most adults regard you guys as gender neutral and, as such, innocuous. It is therefore noteworthy that most respondents who confessed to habitual use of the term also stated that it is inappropriate when its referents constitute an all-female group. This means that lexical units exist on more than one level — that is, surface meaning is never detached from more profound social meanings. Most speakers, however, are unaware of their own speech acts. Hofstadter notes, "so few people are truly attentive to language — to how they themselves use it, to how other people use it, to how it reflects underlying mental processes, and to how it reflects social conventions and perceptions" (Sexist Language 24). In responding to the statement, "I am aware that you guys is offensive to some people," ten of the forty-three respondents who said yes — almost 25 percent — added that prior to answering the questionnaire, they had not given any thought to the expression. And that percentage represents only the honest responses.

"What do you guys think?" (Female university professor addressing a graduate class of 29 women and one man)

Nongeneric Guise

If we believe linguistic determinists such as Sapir and Whorf who maintain language has the power to determine how we view the world around us, we cannot use terminology such as mankind or you guys without considering their implications in a society where everyone is supposed to be regarded as equal. In fact, Kleinman suspects "[you guys] entered the scene around the time that official titles like 'chairman' were being challenged" (1). She writes, "You can push the provost to change freshman to first-year student or complain to publishers about their use of congressman in textbooks. But, you can't go to court to make your friends stop using you guys" (1).

There is no doubt that you guys has gender implications. For native speakers of English, the prototype of guys is male human beings. Here's a simple fill-in-the-blank test:

Guys and gals are nongradable antonyms, or complementary pairs, as are man and woman, boy and girl, male and female (Yule 118-119). So, if the prototypical guy is a single male human being and a woman is also a guy, or single male human being, what is a gal? And why isn't she speaking up? An ever-growing number of women call other women guys, and they don't seem to mind the designation for themselves. Hofstadter, who writes that he has been "railing against the term for years," suggests that people find the expression difficult to give up, partly because they don't know what to use in its stead (You've Come a Long Way, Guys!).

"You guys need to make a plan you can both get excited about!" (Dr. Phil McGraw counseling a heterosexual couple considering divorce)

Vocative Guise

Some have suggested that you guys fills the gap left by thou, ye, and thee, which fell out of use sometime during the Middle Ages, leaving the objective plural you to cover all second-person bases. People preferred you to more familiar forms of address because it conveyed respect and reverence for people whom they considered their social superiors, and it expressed respect and politeness toward their peers. We now have, therefore, a language in need of a distinct plural vocative. And as any linguist will tell you, languages are loath to import or create new function words. Once they are lost, they are lost forever. Indeed, during the 1970s and 1980s, American feminists tried unsuccessfully to create generic pronouns to replace he/she and himself/herself. Clearly, speakers would rather struggle with awkward he/she and singular they than welcome a new function word into the language; and so the gap remains.

"Would you guys like some grated parmigiana da Reggio?" (Twenty-something waiter to four seventy-something diners)

Accommodation Theory

Sociolingistics tells us that when we like the people with whom we're talking or when we want to gain their confidence or trust, we change our speech to accommodate them, to speak as they do. Van Dijk agrees, "people everywhere adjust their speech according to how they view those they are speaking with" (254). Adults simplify their language when speaking to children; politicians change their language behavior, even their accents, depending on the dominant social and educational status of their immediate audience; Northerners slow down their speech when speaking to Southerners; native speakers simplify and pace their delivery when addressing nonnative speakers. Although this seems likely, for we can probably find hundreds of instances in which we accommodate our interlocutors' speech, it does not account for the proliferation of you guys as a form of address because, for many men and women, you guys is an insult. This suggests there are other factors that are far stronger than an inherent willingness accommodate.

The implication of accommodation theory is that both parties accommodate and then assimilate so that they end any given conversation almost in the middle of a linguistic identity switch. However, this assumes each speaker likes the other or wants something he or she has. But consider that men as a group enjoy greater professional and economic standing than do women; and consider which gender is evoked when one wants to impart an insult ("You're acting like a woman"). Given the obvious responses to the above, it follows that women are more likely to accommodate men, to try to sound more like men, perhaps even to adopt their terminology and speech behavior. That's why women become guys and men do not become gals.

It is also possible to take accommodation theory to its logical extension and propose that in addressing a group of women or women and men as you guys, one is giving women the option of ignoring the message. Brown and Levinson suggest a similar possibility in regard to plural you, which "provides a conventional out for the hearer. ... That is, since it doesn't literally single out the addressee, it is as if the speaker were giving [the hearer] the option to interpret it as applying to [him/her] rather than ... to [his/her] companion" (cf. Goody 203). This subtle form of backhanded politeness, of course, would be entirely subconscious on the part of the speaker, but it can be explained in terms of the roles history has assigned to women and the tenacity of the myths haunting those roles. After all, women sometimes need to defer to their stronger male companions, for they are weak, emotional, and easily unnerved — the weaker sex. Women who don't want membership in a club of such dubious quality will probably opt to join the other club — the guy club.

"Before I pay, I'd like to see what you guys have to offer." (Male client negotiating with female brothel employee. From a TV documentary)

Traditional Explanations of Women's Linguistic Behaviors

Sociolinguistics claim that women use more Standard English than do men. Holmes notes the contrariness of investigating women for using standard forms as though standard forms were manifestations of aberrant behavior. Why not, she writes, investigate men's traditional repudiation of Standard English (158)? Nevertheless, many sociolinguists believe that women's fondness for speaking well is related to their traditional familiar and societal roles, and they are fond of analyzing the "peculiarity."

• Women Are More Status Conscious Than Men; therefore, they try to create an aura of having achieved a certain social elevation by using standard forms of English. The data supporting this contention are based on interviewers' judgments of standard pronunciation and prescriptive language. As Holmes wisely notes, the symbiotic nature of the interview triggers the mechanism of accommodation, which makes it impossible to analyze interviewees' normal speech behavior (236).

• Women Are Guardians of Societal Values, and one of those values is prescriptive grammar. Sociologists have long known that adults are swift to correct misbehavior in girls, but tend to shrug off similar behavior in boys. And since good behavior is equated with standard speech, it is logical that teachers and parents will tend to correct girls' nonprescriptive speech and ignore it in boys. Thus, when little girls grow to adulthood, society looks to them to serve up the next generation of well-behaved children. We know the responsibility of childrearing falls exclusively on women because when baby grows up to be a social misfit, it's usually mom's fault.

• Women Are Subordinates; therefore, they are more polite than men. Women have played and still do play a subordinate role in American society. They are paid less than men; they dominate lower paying jobs; they struggle to bring in a paycheck and bring up children, often with no help from their children's fathers. Instead of recognizing and praising women's strengths and resourcefulness in the face of all this stress and struggle, sociolinguists claim women try to compensate for their apparent or authentic handicaps by being extra polite, which means using Standard English, saying please and thank you, using hedges such as like and I mean. Again, standard speech is assumed to be a manifestation of polite speech; polite speech is assumed to be a deviation from the norm.

These explanations of women's speech behavior seem quaintly old-fashioned, but they are not innocuous for they perpetuate traditional ideas about woman's place. And, in so doing, they encourage women to imitate masculine speech as if to prove there is no such thing as women's language behavior. The paradox is that women are also adopting traditional forms of nonprescriptive masculine speech ("Me and him went to a party"), even referring to one another as masculine beings, or guys. After all, as Holmes tells us, "vernacular forms express machismo" (160), and you guys is a decidedly vernacular form of address.

Women have not yet completed their quest for liberation from the bonds of old thinking; instead, they are stuck in the guy phase of the journey, attempting to become more like the men who once owned the rights to their bodies, material possessions, and even their thoughts. Unfortunately, in identifying themselves and one another as guys, they are confirming rather than denying that the old patriarchal order is alive and well, and supported by women and men of all walks of American life. In fact, it's a clever way to escape the analytical eyes of social and linguistic scholars, who never assess men's linguistic behavior as aberrant. Men who use Standard English are educated; women who use Standard English are trying to compensate for their social, economic, and academic inadequacies. Isn't that right, you guys?

"Okay, Chuck, Sue. Now back to you guys in the studio." (NBC news person — all of them)

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