This is where this debate can get into sensitive territory. So if someone values language that supports equality, but is unwilling to back away from “you guys,” they probably should be able to explain why. And because we choose pronouns so automatically, it can be hard to change habits, even with strenuous mental effort, as those now incorporating the singular “they” may have discovered.įor all the same reasons, however, doing the work to adopt new pronoun customs sends a strong message about one’s personal or cultural beliefs, Mallinson explains. We repeat what we hear in the “linguistic ether,” says Mallinson, without much thought. For most others, pronouns fly under the radar. In fairness, Mallinson is still willing to cut many people slack for uttering “you guys.” The pronoun may be a curiosity, or an insidious annoyance, for academics, she says, but they are a niche group. However, the professor, who has spent 20 years studying varieties of English, including Southern US English and Appalachian English, also believes that more people are beginning to see “you guys” as problematic for women, and for the gender nonconforming and trans communities, just as Southern culture is gaining cachet. Indeed, Mallinson has a couple of theories about the pronoun’s failure to take hold nationally or internationally. So why is this is happening now, when we have largely come to accept that language can change the way you perceive the world? And when most would agree that, as the University of North Carolina sociology professor Sherryl Kleinman wrote in a powerful essay published in 2002, the use of universal male pronoun is “another indicator-and, more importantly, a reinforcer-of a system in which ‘man’ in the abstract and men in the flesh are privileged over women?”Īnd especially when, as Christine Mallinson, a professor of language, literacy, and culture at The University of Maryland, Baltimore County, points out, “y’all” is sitting right there, offering us a lovely, ready-made solution to avoid calling everyone men? “Y’all” is sitting right there, offering us a lovely, ready-made solution to avoid calling everyone men. People with depression are more likely to say certain words “You guys,” rolls off the tongues of avowed feminists every day, as if everyone has agreed to let one androcentric pronoun pass, while others (the generic “he” or “men” as stand-ins for all people) belong to the before-we-knew-better past. The second, an undeniable reference to a group of men, is the default everywhere else, even when the “guys” in question are women, or when the speaker is communicating to a mixed gender group. In reality, only two alternatives to the vague plural “you” disappear into American conversations without friction: “y’all” and “you guys.”īut here’s what’s hard to explain: The first, a gender-neutral option, mainly thrives in the American South and hasn’t been able to steal much linguistic market share outside of its native habitat. Reusable plastic shopping bags are actually making the problem worse, not better Several more economical micro-regional varieties (youz, yinz) exist, but they lack wide appeal. “You folks” or “you gang” both feel self-conscious. “You all”-as in “I’m talking to you all,” or “Hey, you all!”-sounds wordy and stilted. “You” may address one person or a bunch, but it can be imprecise and unsatisfying. English speakers have been deprived of a truly functional, second person plural pronoun since we let “ye” fade away a few hundred years ago.
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