351–360 of 381 posts
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I'd hardly call Red Lobster formal. "Red Lobster Hospitality, LLC is an American casual dining restaurant chain," according to Wikipedia.
Any interaction a 16 year old employee has with a group of strange women who are customers and are older than him should be respectful.
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Even as far west as Colorado we used it the same way when I was young. Then I got a job at an NYC company and the gendered-ness of it was frowned upon. I actually switched to "ya'll" and it worked great. All the New Yorkers just thought that's how Coloradoans talk. So, thanks Texas. Totally unrelated but this Blaze Foley song talks specifically about getting back to a place "where the people say ya'll." It's beautifu…
That's just corporate culture, not NY I grew up using guys just to refer to group of people
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"Guys" means "people". I have grown up in the Midwest as well where it's common to hear girls and women use it to address all-female groups. It's basically like how "mankind" or "man" is short for "humankind" or "human" and not for "male". These are also backed up in dictionaries that are more than a few years old One of my former employers only a few years ago announced that they would ban the term "guys" because so…
I’ve said “you guys” all my life (grew up in the northeast) but I’m a professor and teach mixed-gender classes from all over the world. Plenty of people are completely fine with “guys” as a gender neutral term and express bafflement that there would be a problem. However: a non-trivial percentage find it weird, not necessarily because HR told them to, but because it really sounds odd to them. One person asked me if i…
"how many guys have you dated" is not a collective noun.
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Right, it's only the plural that's gender neutral. Kinda like how in Spanish "abeula" means "grandma", "abuelas" means "grandmas", and "abuelo" means "grandpa", but "abuelos" means "grandparents", not "grandpas". The masculine plural is gender inclusive in most contexts.
Singular example: If you call a plumber and they say “I’ll send a guy over”, there’s no implication that it’s male. Singular and genderless.
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I’ve said “you guys” all my life (grew up in the northeast) but I’m a professor and teach mixed-gender classes from all over the world. Plenty of people are completely fine with “guys” as a gender neutral term and express bafflement that there would be a problem. However: a non-trivial percentage find it weird, not necessarily because HR told them to, but because it really sounds odd to them. One person asked me if i…
"guys" is nongendered when it is a colletive noun. "how many guys have you dated" is not a collective noun.
I tease non-Texans that Texan English is actually superior to normal American English because it supports second-person plural via "Y'all" exactly as mentioned in this article... "you guys" is, to some ears, sexist, and "youse guys" (a New York-ism) is a little too old-school Italian. English lost its second person plural when we switched from Thou (second person singular formal + Thee=second person singular informal…
I think it's a bit of a stretch to say "y'all" somehow belongs to Texas, it's roots are almost certainly in other areas of the South and Appalachia where it is still used just as frequently as it is in modern-day Texas.
I tease non-Texans that Texan English is actually superior to normal American English because it supports second-person plural via "Y'all" exactly as mentioned in this article... "you guys" is, to some ears, sexist, and "youse guys" (a New York-ism) is a little too old-school Italian. English lost its second person plural when we switched from Thou (second person singular formal + Thee=second person singular informal…
I actually started using the term y’all after I learned French. One you’re introduced to the concept of ‘vous’ you realize how weird it is that English doesn’t have a standard equivalent.
If I'm recalling The History of English podcast correctly, "you" was originally the plural/formal 2nd person pronoun, while "thou" was singular. Eventually language did its thing and the default shifted. Now we think of "thou" as old timey and formal!