As a native Southerner, I was amused (but not very surprised) to notice that my students in Michigan have their own plural version as well – “you guys.” It’s used for both men and women (so the “guys” part doesn’t have its usual masculine connotation) and, as kind of a clencher for the argument that it’s acting as a unitary pronoun, the possessive in informal speech is “you guys’s” (the last word sounds exactly like “guises”).

 

As for singular they, I’m still requiring plural-only they in college written work, on the assumption that this is what is expected in wider use. I was surprised to find, however, that one of my students had been marked down on a paper in a previous class for using “him/her” instead of singular they. It’s at times like these that the descriptivist in me gives ground to the pragmatist: I don’t care which system wins out, but I wish we’d hit a firm consensus soon so I can stop worrying that I’ll get my students in trouble by teaching them the wrong thing.

 

Bill Spruiell

 

Dept. of English

Central Michigan University

 

 

Dick - The only problem with driving out the singular thou/thee is that we are now left without a definitive plural - except, of course, if you live in the South, where you solve this problem with "y'all."  To rephrase Yakof Schmirnoff, "English.  Vat a language!"

By the way, didn’t a similar socio-political thing happen a few centuries back with plural “you” becoming singular as a polite alternative to singular “thou”? It proved so successful that it drove thou/thee from the language.

 

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