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?
The Eye of Sauron in the news
On Morning Edition, David Greene asked Andrew Weiss, who served under two administrations in the Pentagon, State Department, and National Security Council, if it’s possible for National Security principals to disagree with the current president. Weiss’s response:
“I think the best analogy I’ve heard for how things work comes from the movie The Lord of the Rings, where there’s this disembodied eye, the Eye of Sauron, that hovers over everything. In the Trump administration, if the Eye is looking at you, it’s basically all hope is lost.”[I don’t know The Lord of the Rings. But I know people who do.]
“Letter-writing types”
April 1944. Devon, England. Of “some sixty American enlisted men” taking a pre-Invasion training course, “there wasn’t one good mixer in the bunch”:
J.D. Salinger, “For Esmé — with Love and Squalor,” in Nine Stories (1953).
Related reading
All OCA Salinger posts (Pinboard)
Wednesday, November 6, 2019
Hi and Lois lore
Eight Things You Might Not Know About Hi and Lois (Mental Floss). If you’ve read Mort Walker and Dik Browne’s The Best of “Hi and Lois” (1986), you probably already know or once knew one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, or all eight of these things.
Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)
“What we make happen”
Fonny’s father Frank, Tish’s father Joseph, planning for the future:
James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk (1974).
Also from James Baldwin
“The burden is reality” : “Life is tragic” : “She was Sanctified holy” : “Somewhere in time”
Tuesday, November 5, 2019
¡Spangled!
Gaby Moreno and Van Dyke Parks. ¡Spangled! (Nonesuch, 2019). Playing time: 37:31.
A beautiful album (CD/LP/MP3) of music from the Americas, ten songs for singer and orchestra, in English, Portuguese, and Spanish, with Gaby Moreno’s deeply soulful voice and Van Dyke Parks’s always surprising and apt orchestrations and vocal arrangements.
The overtly political notes here are clear: “Across the Borderline” (Ry Cooder, John Hiatt, Jim Dickinson) speaks of the peril and pathos of the journey to “the broken promised land,” with a traveler who is still always “just across the borderline,” yet to find a place in the United States. But “The Immigrants” (David Rudder) strikes a different note: “The immigrants are here to stay, to help build America.” Elsewhere, the songs of this album, many of them venerable popular classics (one from 1914), speak of love and death and the power of song. My favorites, after repeated listening: “Historia de un Amor” (Carlos Eleta Almarán), “Nube Gris” (Eduardo Márquez Talledo), “Esperando na Janela” (Targino Gondim, Manuca Almeida, and Raimundinho do Acordeon), “O Cantador” (Dorival Caymmi and Nelson Motta), and “Espérame en el Cielo” (Francisco López Vidal).
A line from “O Cantador”: “Cantador só sei cantar”: Singer, I only know how to sing. ¡Spangled! is all-American song of the highest order.
Here is “Across the Borderline,” with Jackson Browne and Ry Cooder. Dig the strings at 2:42, and everything else:
Related reading
All OCA Van Dyke Parks posts (Pinboard)
[The songs I’ve named, from first to last, come from the United States, Trinidad, Panama, Peru, Brazil (two songs), and Puerto Rico.]
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
