I am puzzled as to why anyone would consider guys a pronoun. A plural noun that includes everyone — folks , people — is a noun. When you precedes such a noun — you folks, you people — you functions as a vocative, denoting the person or thing addressed or invoked. And as the Oxford English Dictionary says, the vocative you is used “chiefly in apposition to a following noun or noun phrase” (my emphasis). And now I’m remembering the children’s book: “You monkeys, you! You give me back my caps.”
Bill of Occam can help here: we need not multiply entities unnecessarily. To my mind, calling guys a pronoun is just such a feat of multiplication. But if I’m missing something here, please let me know.
A related post
The guys problem
Thursday, November 7, 2019
Is guys a pronoun?
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A common expression in the east: youse guys.
ReplyDeleteAmen. I once cited youse in a post about guys. Forgot all about it.
ReplyDeleteI am unsuccessfully trying to make up a sentence with 'guys' in tht slot... "Professor Leddy shot a black look at guy."????
ReplyDeleteI'm a little lost. The book Mary Norris is writing about treating just guys , plural, as a pronoun.
ReplyDelete"But “guys,” in the plural, has come to include everyone—it’s a loose version of “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, mesdames et messieurs.”
ReplyDeleteAnd those are all . . . not pronouns.
Forget "youse." I love the reference to "yinz." I can hear it now.
Not pronouns — exactly. Friends, kids, peeps: I don’t get the logic of calling such words pronouns.
ReplyDeleteMaybe we should pronounce it like it's French: gee (rhymes with "me")
ReplyDeleteI see — more pronoun-like. You gees?
ReplyDelete