Ladies and Gentlemen

In the 20th century, “guys” continued its expansion, becoming less particular as it grew more general. This chapter illustrates this development with many examples. At first there are a few outliers with an extended meaning, then more, until the extended is included without calling attention to it. “Guy” and “guys” first extended their meaning to encompass every male, infant to geezer. In the process they discarded their negative restrictions to low class or badly dressed, so “guy” was now, often enough, just a neutral designation for a male. And “guys” stretched even further, to include women. At first, as in Edna Ferber’s 1911 novel Dawn O’Hara, The Girl Who Laughed, it’s a mixed group, in this case one woman in an audience of five journalists being addressed by another one, a male. But if “guys” can include one woman, why not all? That’s the case in Rachel Crothers’s 1911 play, “He and She,” that has “guys” entirely female, in the phrase “wise guys.” By mid-century, in most of the United States, “guys” was the normal scarcely noted second-person plural pronoun. It has spread around the world also. Even speakers in Guy Fawkes’s home town of York, England, now use “you guys,” where it was unheard as recently as two decades ago.