I had the reverse experience from the one
Bill Spruill quoted:
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 a freshly transplanted Northerner in Wilmington, North
Carolina, thirty years ago, I was invited by my chair
to play tennis. Some confusion arose about which tennis balls on the court
belonged to whom, and when the student on the adjacent court asked me, “Y’all
got all y’all’s balls?” I knew I wasn’t in Iowa any more.
Dick Veit
________________________________
Richard Veit
Department of English
University of North Carolina Wilmington
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