Quote:
Originally Posted by Luckbox Inc
"You guys' is used because English lost its 2nd person plural pronouns. Much has been written on it, but the issue you're going to find when trying to replace it is that there aren't a lot of good replacement candidates. People aren't going to want to say "you all" or "y'all" because it's too Southern.
I think this is the heart of the issue. Guy always referred to a group of males. Girls or gals referred to a group of females. But as workplaces started having mixed groups of workers, there was no obvious word for a group of both "guys and gals". So guys has been used as a default, with a sort of hand wave that now it means both men and women.
But it really didn't lose its male overtones. Females were just sort of told to live with it. But a look at the reverse usage gives a sense of how awkward it actually is. Imagine you are a male nurse, or elementary school teacher or in any traditionally female dominated profession. You are in a group workplace meeting with the boss, who comes and says "Hi girls. I just want to say that all you gals did a great job on the project last week". Most men would be like WTF, I'm no girl. After the meeting you mention to the boss that since you're not a girl or gal it seemed inappropriate to call you that. And she said, " don't worry about it. The terms girls and gals include people of both genders.
No "guy" would buy that. You can also look at the more formal terms used for mixed groups. We say "good evening ladies and gentlemen...". Or we might use a generic term like good evening everyone. But we don't say good evening gentlemen and then tell the ladies that when addressing a mixed group, gentlemen means both sexes, because we only want to use one word.
The reason guy became the stand in for a generic term is that in most workplaces it was a few women becoming part of a largely male group, so the males basically just kept using the male only word references. But I think it would be better if a generic term for a mixed group came into usage. Can we all agree on this, gals?