6 ms·

As a native midwesterner, I get more annoyed and defensive than I should when people complain that “you guys” isnt gender neutral. Where I come from, everyone i

• giraffe_lady 2y ago
  This would be plausible if I had ever heard a straight man talk about the guys he had dated.
  • Ajedi32 2y ago
    The context of dating makes it no longer gender neutral. ("Guys and gals") But I've definitely heard people refer to groups composed entirely of women as "you guys".
    • giraffe_lady 2y ago
      I've still never heard, for example "this guy" when referring to eg a specific female coworker. I live in the midwest. "You guys" is frequently used as a genderless plural sure I guess but "guy" is not gender neutral.
      • Ajedi32 2y ago
        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.
        • giraffe_lady 2y ago
          Ok but that's a different claim than the one I was originally replying to. And anyway the masculine plural being genderless is a convention of romance languages, which english is not. It is not useful or consistent to describe expectations for english usage in terms of the features of other languages. Negative concord and invariant be are common language features globally but you don't hear white americans scrambling to include them in standard usage.
          • Ajedi32 2y ago
            There are plenty of other situations in English where the masculine plural is gender inclusive (probably because so much of English is borrowed from romance languages). For example, "actors" can refer to both male and female actors, "actresses" cannot. Identity politics has resulted in certain groups making concerted efforts to try to eliminate such usages, but it's still an ingrained part of our language.
            • giraffe_lady 2y ago
              [flagged]
              • Ajedi32 2y ago
                "it" in this case referring to gender inclusive masculine plural nouns as a feature of the English language, not the particular use of "you guys" as one. That phrasing may well be new. Actually it seems like the phrase "you guys" is itself pretty new, see: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=you+guys&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=you+guys&year_...
        • parpfish 2y ago
          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.
          • lupire 2y ago
            Not sure I agree.
      • zer8k 2y ago
        Context changed the use of language. If you know any foreign languages you know two words that are more or less the same carry a different meaning in context.
  • MisterTea 2y ago
    Because it's for group greetings and not addressing individuals. e.g. My female friend from Long Island uses it to address her friends in group settings but never has referred to her wife as "guy" and neither has anyone I ever knew growing up in NY.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• zer8k 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • parpfish 2y ago
    I use parner for non-gender reasons: - You might not know their status (married? Dating?) and the phrase “significant other” is clunky - for grown adults, terms like boyfriend/girlfriend can come off as a little dismissive or juvenile
    • zer8k 2y ago
      I've been a grown adult for a long time and still use boyfriend/girlfriend. This obsession with absolute correctness is probably why we are so miserable all the time. To me it's simple 1. Married -> Husband/Wife 2. Dating -> Girlfriend/Boyfriend 3. Middle Ground -> Fiance/fiancee I've yet to see a case this doesn't cover so "partner" seems like a solution looking for a problem.
      • radlad 2y ago
        "Fiance/fiancee" is not a middle-ground, it means you have proposed and your partner has agreed to marriage. There are plenty of couples who may as well be married, but choose not to participate in that social construct. Your comment about correctness is a bit ironic in context however.
      • parpfish 2y ago
        So If you meet a couple and don’t know if they’re married or dating, you just decide to call them fiance/fiancee? That’s like thinking “I can just replace null with 0 or empty string. Means the same thing”
  • radlad 2y ago
    I wonder why you find the term "partner" insufferable? As a Midwesterner comfortable with "you guys," I refer to my partner as my partner because it feels far more appropriate after dating for 7 years than "girlfriend." I also don't care whether others assume I am straight or gay.
• cpburns2009 2y ago
  I don't think people outside the midwest understand just how ubiquitous "you guys" is here. After a previous time this discussion occurred on HN, I had to chuckle to myself when I heard my sister address a group of little girls as "you guys". It's our version of "y'all".
  • spondylosaurus 2y ago
    Midwest? I thought it was just a West Coast thing! (Also extremely ubiquitous in SoCal.)
    • WrongAssumption 2y ago
      It’s both https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/9cw3gb/you_guys_v_yall_in_the_united_states/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/9cw3gb/you_guys_v_...
    • Aloha 2y ago
      SoCal it can also be replaced with dude/dudes
      • spondylosaurus 2y ago
        This is true. Sometimes I'll even address my wife as "dude"...
  • troyvit 2y ago
    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 beautiful: https://blazefoley.bandcamp.com/track/clay-pigeons https://blazefoley.bandcamp.com/track/clay-pigeons
    • radlad 2y ago
• JasserInicide 2y ago
  It's a sentiment that's only come up in the past 15 years. Same with the "Latinx" bullshit (that white people came up with)
  • kanbara 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • kbelder 2y ago
      >who are latin@ Is that a real thing or are you joking?
      • Tyr42 2y ago
        It's got the O around the a, it's super cute for typing and impossible to say.
        • ternnoburn 2y ago
          Latinao is the pronunciation I've heard.
      • 1-more 2y ago
        it's older than latinx
      • Diti 2y ago
        Considering the comment history of the person you are talking to (basically only ever replies to fight over social justice), I think they must be mentioning a real trend.
        • zahlman 2y ago
          The Wikipedia article is surprisingly on-point and insightful for a contemporary culture-war concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinx
• ternnoburn 2y ago
  It's true! But it's also imprecise because of that ambiguity. Take the following construction, "Now, all you guys are going to step off the dance floor." Which could mean everyone clear out, or just the fellahs. I don't get worried about people preferring a term that isn't "you guys", because it's probably an improvement to the language over all, even if it's some friction to change.
  • cmurdock 2y ago
    I don't think anyone would use that construction though in the midwest if they only meant the men. If they wanted all the guys to get off the dance floor they would say "Now, all the guys are going to step off the dance floor." "The guys" is much different than "you guys", at least where I live. Granted, it is murky so I also don't really care about switching to y'all. The only problem I have with "y'all" is that it is such a southern thing that using it to me with my midwest accent sounds forced and awkward (At least to my ears).
  • mitthrowaway2 2y ago
    This doesn't seem ambiguous. "All you guys are" seems to be narrowing the focus of the sentence, because otherwise it would be more fluidly spoken as "all of you are", and it sounds unnatural to add to the sentence for no other purpose. (It sounds somewhat unnatural under either interpretation, though). If it had been "you guys are all", perhaps that would be ambiguous, but only with a strong emphasis on the word 'guys', which is not how the phrase is normally spoken. Either way I'd expect the dance teacher to be using hand gestures at the same time to indicate which people they're giving directions to.
• kube-system 2y ago
  Right, the problem isn't that this usage is invalid, it's that it's highly dependent on a specific context.
• Minor49er 2y ago
  "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 some people thought it was sexist. The ban was droppped because many people openly objected to the needless censorship while others simply saw no problem with the word and naturally just kept on using it. It was around the same time when coders and real estate agents were working to ban the term "master" from everything
  • matthewdgreen 2y ago
    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 it would sound normal to ask “how many guys have you dated recently” and I took their point that this would indeed sound very gendered. The lesson is: things that sounded normal to you and your peer group growing up might not work in the larger and more culturally diverse world you encounter professionally. So why insist on them? I’ve switched to “you folks” which makes me sound like I’m about to lead a square dance, but people seem to find it disarming.
    • lupire 2y ago
      "guys" is nongendered when it is a colletive noun. "how many guys have you dated" is not a collective noun.
      • matthewdgreen 2y ago
        In 18th century England it used to refer to women. The point being that language usage has both regional and temporal variance, so why not avoid terms that some people might find uncomfortable? I’m offering this not as a dictate from the language police, but as a suggestion to improve your effectiveness as a professional communicator - a skill that is highly correlated with long-term career success.
• nuancebydefault 2y ago
  (Non native English speaker) I find adressing a mixed group of people as 'you guys' has coolness to it. "You guys get the freakin' job done"
• sangnoir 2y ago
  > Where I come from, everyone is “a guy”. Gen Alpha (and younger Zoomers) are working hard to make "bro", "bruh" and "dude" gender-neutral[1] everywhere - and they are succeeding. In decade, those complaining about "you guys" will seem quaint. 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/teenagers/comments/184ni9j/does_anyone_else_parents_get_offended_when_you/ https://www.reddit.com/r/teenagers/comments/184ni9j/does_any...
  • starkparker 2y ago
    > bruh "breh" was and will be gender-neutral in south Louisiana long after everyone else has forgotten any debates around whether or not it actually is or whatever it was co-opted from have a feeling hawaiians feel similarly about "brah"/"braddah"
  • bigfatkitten 2y ago
    My 14 year old daughter and her female friends call each other "bro" all the time.
• e40 2y ago
  I’m on the west coast. I was talking to a neighbor about their barking dog and exclaimed “dude!” when she lied directly to my face (her dog was barking and she said it wasn’t her dog). Her reaction? Angrily saying she was a woman. Dude has been gender neutral for many decades around these parts.