Usage of the word "guys" as a generic, non-gendered colloquialism for a group of humans

Heh… now I’m picturing addressing my next group email to We.

“We the Staff and Crew,”

Nah, sounds too declarative. But not creepy.

Maybe I’ll try “Recipients.” That could be the 21st century version of “To Occupant.”

It seems to work as an auto-hyponym (like cow or dog), so unless gender is important or you make it clear that you’re referring to a subset of the group (e.g. “this question is for the guys”), it’s neutral. “You people” sounds a bit confrontational, y’all/all y’all sounds a bit redneck and youse sounds a bit Norn Irish. I’d rather stop referring to men as guys and make the term completely neutral if I had the choice, since in my experience that’s the way it’s used most of the time. It comes from a very roundabout origin though - apparently something like Guy Fawkes > person of eccentric appearance or dress (possibly due to the ‘Guys’ dressed in ragged clothes that were made by kids to be burned) > fellow (which is another interesting word, meaning an average guy or an incorporated senior member of a college).

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Team,

We need to …

insert list here of what everyone else needs to do

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“Hey you” works for individuals and groups. So versatile! And not indicative of gender or any other characteristics, so, uh, win-win, yes?

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That’s it - “team” is my new “guys”.

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Perhaps this isn’t notable, but while spanish has 100% gendered nouns, it also has two grammatically correct gender-neutral conjugations for referring to and addressing mixed gender groups of people:

Ustedes, and Vosotros. So while, a bar is always a female cantina, and the computer mouse is always a male ratón, you can still address a mixed gender group as y’all in two different ways that have no gendering and are grammatically correct.

At least I didn’t suggest Nick Frost’s preferred choice from Shaun of the Dead…

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So does Portuguese (and a bunch of other languages, I bet).
Nós = us
Vocês = “yous”

Simple, obvious, sidesteps all this gendered malarkey. “You guys” is just an ugly hack to fix a weird bug in English. Didn’t anyone think “you” might need a plural eventually? :slight_smile:

Because words like guy, man, and guma, aren’t masculine enough?

If you’re talking to a group of women, it would be “vosotras”, so it’s not quite neutral. Also, you could say “brava” to congratulate a woman. You can gender neutralise pronouns when writing by using @ (vosotr@s, latin@s), which I thought was quite clever. While “nosotras” is perfectly grammatical, apparently it’s rare enough that it’s used as something of an implicit feminist symbol of identity.

“Don’t tease me, bro!”

Is that a real word? (asks the non-Californian)

‘lot’, ‘bunch’, ‘set’, ‘gaggle’, ‘mob’, ‘group’, ‘freaks’

…all my other ideas were taken…

oh yeah! I’m Scottish.

‘Cunts’.

Sorry.

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It’s new to me.

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It isn’t Californian. It is Sopranoese. Goomah/gumar means mistress.

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As a midwesterner who was accustomed to the “guys” thing, I found myself quickly adopting y’all after dating a southerner for a bit…

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Mutants.

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What the fuck?

“Guma” is a perfectly good English and Common Germanic word, it just isn’t used any more, it meant “male” back when “were” and “man” were still gender-inclusive.

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Things.

Sentients.

Beings.

Brief digression: I was a Theatre Arts major in college, and every now and then we’d have occasion to refer to a single member of an audience. Rather than go to the trouble of all those syllables in “that member of the audience right there,” we would instead just refer to him or her as an “audient.” Because if you have more than one audient, you have an audience.

If it ain’t right, it should be.

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Ah, that’s good to know. I thought it was those low-level adversaries from the Mario Bros. games.

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