4 ms·

> "To the women readers/watchers: I apologize for saying "guys" in a few places referring to groups of people" As a non-native speaker, isn't "guys" a correct

• moey 11y ago
  Yes it is and him offering an apology for it was quite ridiculous to be honest.
• ams6110 11y ago
  Yep it's almost completely gender-neutral.
• sandyarmstrong 11y ago
  It's common, but not correct.
  • nkozyra 11y ago
    Given the fluidity of language, I'd say it's common enough that it is now correct as a gender-neutral address, like "folks" or :shudder: "y'all."
    • kllrnohj 11y ago
      Not really. It's still a microaggression in gender-sensitive contexts (such as women in tech)
      • nkozyra 11y ago
        There's malice and then there's perception. One could certainly look at just about any colloquialism without intended malice and draw "microaggression" from it. Knowing where to draw that line is not - nor has it ever been - universal.
        • Cushman 11y ago
          You're literally describing what microaggressions are: Small interactions, any one of which is harmless and without ill intent, which accumulate over the course of the day, week, or lifetime as an atmosphere of pervasive discrimination which is completely invisible to those responsible for creating it. Microaggressions are insidious precisely because they're so innocuous; they let well-intentioned people participate unwittingly in systemic oppression that they would never consciously support. If you're noticing yourself get a bit defensive about this idea, forget the word itself and just frame it like this: You're a well-meaning person, and you want to avoid causing unnecessary harm with your words. So when you're around people who have really different life experiences than you, how do you make sure you don't cause harm without meaning to?
          • HAAAAMMMM 11y ago
            > You're a well-meaning person, and you want to avoid causing unnecessary harm with your words. I don't like the weaselly binary assumption here. You are implying "You are either a well-meaning person or you are not." That's an unbelievably narrow (and, honestly, childish) view of human interactivity. It also implies that you alone hold a monopoly on how "well-meaning" is defined and that it is your sacred duty to impose that doctrine on others. You're basically attempting to confuse people into accepting your moral ethos as a candidate for common assumptions of what "well-meaning" should be. This is underhanded and not well-meaning at all. Perhaps you should try avoiding causing unnecessary harm with your words next time.
            • Cushman 11y ago
              Huh, I don't get it. I'm being really sincere here; I want you to think seriously about what it means, to you, to be kind to others, and then change your use of language -- or not -- however you see fit. But that message didn't even get past the firewall. Instead you decided to elaborately deconstruct what is probably the least presumptuous part of what I wrote, as a way to impute some contrived ulterior motive to me, as a way to not engage with what I was saying, at length. I guess I don't see what you're hoping to get out of this interaction at this point. Like, okay, you don't need to think about how your words affect other people... if you really don't want to?
      • mycroft-holmes 11y ago
        Meanwhile in the real world everyone, including women, addresses a group of people as 'guys' - even a group that's entirely women. I'm not saying this is right or wrong but saying it's an aggression against women is a bit much.
        • dragonwriter 11y ago
          > Meanwhile in the real world everyone, including women, addresses a group of people as 'guys' - even a group that's entirely women. No, that's simply false. Sure, lots of people do it. Everyone does not.
          • mycroft-holmes 11y ago
            I didn't literally mean everyone. I meant the overwhelming majority of people.
      • HAAAAMMMM 11y ago
        If you think pronoun accuracy is a primary concern regarding women in tech, I'm going to guess you have never seen a woman in tech. They are far more concerned about memory leaks and pointer management.
      • tomjen3 11y ago
        From an article about React to gender in computing in 40 minutes. HN this is disappointing.
• bmelton 11y ago
  From Wiktionary: Singularly, "guy" is a colloquialism for "male". Plurally, "guy" is a gender-neutral colloquialism for "everybody", or "people". http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/guy http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/guy
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• mkirlin 11y ago
  Nope. A guy is a man, multiple guys are multiple men. Gender-neutral equivalents: people, folks, team, friends, colleagues, you all (and various similar regionalisms - yoounz, y'all). Good on him for making the effort.
  • baddox 11y ago
    I'm not sure who gets to prescribe what the word truly means. Descriptively, the plural is used overwhelmingly to refer to a group of people regardless of gender.
• dragonwriter 11y ago
  > As a non-native speaker, isn't "guys" a correct term regardless of the gender? "Guys" can be used in both a male-gender-specific sense (for which the female-gender-specific rough equivalent is "gals"), or in a gender-neutral sense; there is no structural way to distinguish the uses. Like most places in English where a word has both a male-gender-specific use and a gender-neutral use, the latter is somewhat controversial with certain groups, who prefer unambiguously gender-neutral terms rather than dual-use terms that can either be male-gender-specific and gender-neutral.
  • Cushman 11y ago
    To elaborate a bit on why it's considered controversial, I recommend this article by Douglas Hofstadter, from Metamagical Themas: https://books.google.com/books?id=o8jzWF7rD6oC&pg=PA152#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=o8jzWF7rD6oC&pg=PA152#v=on... . It's a pretty rigorous treatment of a pretty weird issue, and it's got pictures! To roughly paraphrase: If "guy" means "man or woman", and "gal"[] means "woman", the two words we actually have are "person" and "woman". The implication of that should be unsettling to anyone who doesn't truly believe that women are a distinct group from the general, male, population. [] Or whatever.
• cp9 11y ago
  it is a correct term, however it is not gender neutral. unfortunately, english doesn't really have a good gender neutral set of pronouns, so you have to make due.
  • tomjen3 11y ago
    Actually we do: Man - gender neutral or gender unknown Woman - gender specific - of the female gender Werman - gender specific - of the male gender It is just that, other than in werwolf, we forgot wer as a prefix.
• dankohn1 11y ago
  I have used "guy" in the past and now make a conscious effort to avoid it. There's no need to create an implicit bias when saying something like, "We'll need to recruit some Python guys to deal with this." Just use "people" instead. (Unless you're referring to the guys in the men's room.)
  • arasmussen 11y ago
    "Hey people!" just doesn't have the same ring as "Hey guys!" I'm starting to use "folks" more for cases like this.
  • baddox 11y ago
    > There's no need to create an implicit bias when saying something like, "We'll need to recruit some Python guys to deal with this." I might question whether the speaker or the listener would be the one creating the supposed bias in that case.
    • dragonwriter 11y ago
      As is usual with communication, the answer of "who creates the resulting effect" is "both the speaker and listener, not one or the other". Particularly, in this case, the speaker's contribution comes by choosing a term which has both a male-gender-specific and a gender-neutral sense rather than something unambiguously gender-neutral.
      • baddox 11y ago
        Are you defining ambiguity by the number of people who report to have each interpretation? I suspect if you asked 1,000 American native English speakers (I don't know about English in other countries) how they interpreted that usage of "guys," the overwhelming majority would respond with the gender-neutral interpretation. Even among the people who are offended by the potential male-only interpretation, I suspect that for most it would be clear that they actually did understand the speaker's intentions.
• HAAAAMMMM 11y ago
  Came here to read about React Native Stayed to laugh the pedantic fixation upon gender pronouns. Stay Hilary, HN.
• reissbaker 11y ago
  It's regional and context-specific. On the U.S. coasts, "guys" is considered gender-neutral when used in an address (e.g. "you guys" or "guys, listen to this"). It seems like depending on region it might be the case that "guys" can be broader (e.g. "Facebook guys" being gender-neutral), although personally as someone who grew up in the Northeast that sounds non-idiomatic to me. (Edit: here's a link to the Harvard Dialect Survey that shows regional variations in addressing groups of two or more people: http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_50.html http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_50....) There's been some linguistic research that shows that men are more likely to interpret "guys" as neutral than women, although unfortunately I don't have a link. Some people prefer not to use the "guys"-as-gender-neutral slang even on the coasts both because it sets male as default and because it can be misinterpreted by people from other parts of the U.S. and the world. Personally I've stopped using it unless I'm actually addressing a group of dudes.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
• DanaDanger 11y ago
  This is a matter of some controversy. There's pressure to shift away from using it in gender-neutral contexts, but there's certainly no broad agreement. If you want to play it safe, use "folks."
  • bmelton 11y ago
    Folks is a classist, and refers to commoners, which might be considered offensive to those in the audience with aspirations, as well as to those in the audience in the upper class. Note, that was slightly tongue in cheek, but this is apparently what we do with words today... find some way in which they could be considered offensive, and then immediately begin to take offense at them. While I understand that there are indeed legitimate reasons to encourage people to choose their words thoughtfully, I can't help but wonder how terrible life will be when choosing to take offense at the innocuous becomes more prevalent than simply choosing not to take offense. The latter is, I believe, the more enlightened path.
    • kaonashi 11y ago
      Punching up vs. punching down.
• egh 11y ago
  No. If I address a mixed gender group, and I ask that "all the guys" raise their hand, everybody will know that I mean men only.
  • bennylope 11y ago
    And if you asked them, "Hey guys, raise your hand if you use the web" you'd get men and women raising their hands. "the guys" != "guys" in this case. The word is very - or awfully, depending on your point of view - ambiguous, and can be used in a gender neutral/ambiguous way, like third-person plural pronouns in other languages.
  • jraines 11y ago
    Yeah, but that's a different phrasing. If you say "You guys can find the pizza in the back", do you think it'll be only men who head for the back?
  • __david__ 11y ago
    Well, duh, that's because you used it in a non-gender-neutral way. If you said, "hey you guys, raise your hands", then that is way more gender neutral. Like all of language, differences in meanings can be subtle. They can also depend on where you are from.
• zem 11y ago
  julia evans did a great survey on this: http://jvns.ca/blog/2013/12/27/guys-guys-guys/ http://jvns.ca/blog/2013/12/27/guys-guys-guys/