Can We Stop Saying This?

[wannahelp]

Is anybody else annoyed by the use of “your guys” instead of “your?”
I’ve also heard “your guys’s” and I don’t understand why it’s become acceptable. I just saw a car insurance commercial, for the umteenth time, in which this sycophantic teenager praises his parents for having accident forgiveness, “which is so smart on your guys part.”
Isn’t it enough that everybody is so busy posting selfies, that there’s no time to utter a complete word or phrase? Instead anything consisting of more than a single syllable is truncated, expressed as an abbreviation like MPGs, or turned into an acronym. Now, on top of that, we are glorifying blatant abuse of our language and promoting the laziness that’s helping textspeak to cannibalize American English. The fact that the kid in the commercial is so irritating, certainly doesn’t help to minimize the offense.

 

[Margret]

I think in this case it's an attempt to make it obvious that "your" is plural rather than singular. If the commercial were set in the American South he'd be saying "on you-all's part," which would also be wrong because it should be "your" and not "you."

Margret

 

[Lari]

I'm trying to think if I say that. "You guys" is sort of the plural "you" around here, the way y'all in the south or yinz in Pittsburgh is. So I can see myself making it possessive, too.

There are certain phrases that rub me the wrong way for whatever reason, but I try not to carp about them, especially if it's likely a dialect thing. I grew up ending sentences and questions with prepositions (you wanna come with?) and when I started college with people from out of town, I was told to my face it was simply bad grammar and they were always correcting me and apparently the Chicago dialect isn't "real" or "valid" like a southern dialect might be and it was really hurtful. (I was also told I said my own last name wrong based on how I was pronouncing a vowel - and yet apparently also couldn't have an accent. I can't even)

I guess in a commercial it's different than speaking with someone from a certain area, but language is different in different areas so I wouldn't say there's only one true "American English" either.

 

[wannahelp]

Let me apologize for the typing mistake in the title. It’s a little ironic in a post about language but in my defense, I still have a bad shoulder.

 

[wannahelp]

Maybe I’m just old and cranky but when i went to school, we were always corrected for things like this. It isn’t just this commercial. It’s infiltrated eveything and become common usage the way “ginormous” did after Elf. That’s the first time I heard the word, anyway. I think the commercial just picked on the fact that it has become so pervasive. I know I’d been hearing it prior.

 

[tinydestroyer]

Yeah, I say y'all since I'm from the South. But I get your point. I was just complaining about how many of the young girls with whom I work have taken to saying "v" to mean "very." As in "that dress is v cute." Definitely taken from text speak, this gets under my skin for whatever reason!

 

[wannahelp]

I’ve never heard that one. That would definitely get under my skin.

 

[Kieka]

Maybe I am odd man out but that sentence makes sense. It's the kid talking to two parents one, right? Maybe it's a California thing buts it's a fairly common term here. Heres a posting about it, The Possessive Your Guys’ Is American English at Its Rough-Spun Best that talks about it but good take away quote from the article is....

"Descriptivists think that a language evolves with its use and that authority lies with the speakers. (As in, they support your using “literally” as an emphasizer.) A prescriptivist would say that the language should, like math, closely adhere to a standard set of rules set out by some agreed-upon authority. Big Grammar, if you would. Your guys’ shows that no matter how much prescriptivists might wring their hands at the death of the mother tongue, English — and every other living language — is just going to keep evolving. It’s a vote for descriptivism. Power to the people, you guys."

 

[tinydestroyer]

Not the odd man out. I suppose I'd fundamentally be a descriptivist Kieka . I got a degree in English, but I certainly don't always speak it correctly. I also don't believe we should forego all neologism in favor of math-like precision in language. Still, it doesn't take away the sting when you hear (imagine a valley girl accent for emphasis
"Sorry to put this on your guy's plate, but...like...I literally have the most ginormous hangover, and can't come in to work today. V sorry!"

Upon further reflection, maybe I don't have an issue with the grammar.

 

[wannahelp]

Okay, I’m an unapologetic stodgy prescriptivist. My teachers always emphasized the distinction between formal and informal speech, where formal went by the book. In the context of the example I mentioned informal is appropriate but I’ll never be comfortable with ‘your guys’ widespread usage. It just sounds awkward. Fortunately, I have plenty of other pet peeves to distract me from this one.

 

[DreamerRose]

The butchery of the English language goes on and on. I agree that that commercial should have just left the "guys" out of it. Darn, that makes it difficult to turn it into a possessive. The really big problem is that people say things like that so often that everyone thinks it's correct.

I could write a very long post on other errors that have snuck sneaked into the language.

 

[Margret]

The problem is that English has some holes in its pronouns. We have no prescribed way to distinguish between "you" singular and "you" plural (and the words derived from you, like "your"), and we continue to have no singular pronoun appropriate for speaking about a person of unknown gender. According to the "rules" (inasmuch as English has rules) we're supposed to ignore these problems. Just use "you/your" and allow context to determine whether it's singular or plural (which is not a useful answer when context could go either way and accuracy is important), and we're supposed to assume that the hypothetical person of unknown gender is male, because that's the default in English. The problem is that real people speak English, and these particular "rules" grate, so real people come up with the easiest answers that cause the English to make sense to us. "You/your" becomes "you/your guys," or "y'all," and "he" becomes "they," because we'd rather match gender than number (a solution that even Shakespeare resorted to).

And speaking of rules, how many people here were taught by their English teachers that it's somehow wrong/egotistical to use a lot of "I/me/my" words when writing? I certainly heard that, and it's dead wrong. The thing that contributes most to dry, boring writing is passive voice, and the easiest way to change passive voice to active voice is to write from your own point of view. I got out of high school without ever having heard of passive voice, but I had certainly heard that I needed to keep my point of view out of my writing!

Margret

 

[wannahelp]

We were warned against using ‘I’ in formal writing as well. The English pronoun problem is vexing but I’ve never had a problem with ‘your’ being used as plural. The use of ‘they’ to solve the gender problem, when saying he/she is inconvenient or inapplicable, has become even more acceptable than ‘your guys.’ Obviously, they wawn’t meant to be singular but it’s largely taken the place of the missing gender neutral pronoun.

 

[Katie M]

English was my best subject in school, and I say "your guys." I've long since come to accept that the language changes, and already has dialects that some may view as "grammatically incorrect." Heck, since moving to West Virginia, I've learned that people here speak in an interesting way.

 

[blueyedgirl5946]

I spent some time in California when I was a kid. "You guys" was a common term then and that was many years ago.

 

[wannahelp]

I understand regional dialects but that isn’t the case with this one. I just don’t have an issue with ‘your.’ It’s easier to say than ‘your guys,’ which feels very unnatural, when I try to say it. Plus, it doesn’t make sense. If you want it to be plural possessive, isn’t it really, ‘your guys’s?’ It would sound better to me as ‘you guys’s’ because adding the your is like using a double possessive.

 

[Margret]

Nope. "Your guys" becomes a possessive by the addition of a single apostrophe at the end: "your guys'." That's the general rule for plural possessives where the original word becomes plural by the addition of an "s." It's less clear to me whether this rule applies to names that end in "s." I believe it does not, but I'm uncertain about that.

Margret

 

[DreamerRose]

Side note: You, your, yours IS the plural second person. English does have a singular second person: thou, thee, thy, thine. But the Puritans got rid of it, reserving it only for God.

Other European languages still have the singular second person.

Nope. "Your guys" becomes a possessive by the addition of a single apostrophe at the end: "your guys'." That's the general rule for plural possessives where the original word becomes plural by the addition of an "s." It's less clear to me whether this rule applies to names that end in "s." I believe it does not, but I'm uncertain about that

According to the Chicago Manual of Style, only Zeus, Jesus, and one or two other names just add the apostrophe. Everything else adds an apostrophe s - as in James's, and it's supposed to be pronounced, too. But in speech, the double s gets slurred, which mixes people up in the written form.

 

[1CatOverTheLine]

.
Strunk and White's current edition waffles on the subject of possessive plurals ending in, "s;" there's some discussion on the digitised page - some of it quite erudite, and portions thereof rather... err... umm... unsophisticated.

Strunk and White says "Charles's" is correct -- is this still the case?
.

 

[DreamerRose]

The Elements of Style is a wonderful little book, but it's quite old. Manuals, such as Chicago, are what publishing houses use to determine proper usage. The English language is quite fluid and changing all the time, so publishing houses decide how they are going to do it, and when they do, they set the bar for the rest of us. The manual I referenced is the one used by the University of Chicago Press, and it's widely followed in the publishing industry.