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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