And there it has stuck, for a little more than a century: even girls continue to be guys. Eventually, at the start of the 20th century, its plural form became even more generic, used predominantly in the US to address or refer to any group of people, regardless of their gender. Then, slowly over the next couple of centuries the word guy widened its meaning to describe any villainous person or man. To this day, Brits enjoy fireworks and bonfires on “Guy Fawkes Day” – which even enjoys its own jaunty rhyme – although the old tradition of children chanting and collecting “a penny for the guy” to pay for the local fireworks party has pretty well disappeared. And so the bomb-plotter’s first name took hold: in towns and villages up and down the country, the eponymous effigy was made from rags and sticks and eventually thrown onto a fire to the community’s ritual delight. Fawkes’s plan failed, and Brits started to commemorate that fateful day – November 5 – by burning effigies of said “Guy” on bonfires. This admission, I think, strengthens the argument for the African origin of the word.” This is surely an intriguing possibility.Ī more popular and much more widely accepted theory is that the word guy originated in England in the early 17th century, as a result of the infamous “Gunpowder Plot.” In a nutshell: a young Catholic soldier named Guy Fawkes tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament and to assassinate King James I in 1605, in an effort to restore a Catholic monarch to the throne. All the etymological dictionaries I consulted have no insight on the origin of “guy” other than to say that it came to global, mainstream English from American English. David Dalby, a well-regarded English linguist known for his Linguasphere Observatory, once made the case that the plural, non-gendered “guys” in English owes etymological debts to the Wolof “gay,” which is also non-gendered and plural. Kperogi, in his book Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World, “Dr. Something has crested in particular over about the past 10 years.”įirst let’s take a stroll through the origins of the word “guy” – used in both its singular and plural senses. As the linguist John McWhorter explained to The Atlantic in 2018, in a discussion about this very subject: “I think there’s a really serious and welcome reconception of gender lines and relationships between sex and gender going on. We’ve seen substantial changes in our language since then. President Obama used to end his news conferences with “Thanks you guys I appreciate it” – but that was already four years ago (and what a long four years that has been). But how do modern English-speakers – especially female and non-binary folks – respond to that catch-all term used to conveniently and informally address a group of people in the absence of a genderless second person plural in standard English (which German-, Turkish- and Gaelic-speakers, among others, are lucky enough to have in their linguistic toolkits)?Ībout seven years ago Glossophilia published a post called “ Boys will be guys,” which looked at the word guy in all its guises, including how it’s used in the plural to mean “multiple people regardless of their gender.” Admittedly a lighthearted and anecdotal post, it portrayed guys as a perfectly acceptable/accepted term that few objected to at the time. Is “you guys” no longer appropriate to use in our more enlightened gender-neutral speech? It has an undeniably male “twang” to it, that’s for sure.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |