3 ms·
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 lan
by 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_...