By
C.
Neuroticus Absolutus
I cringe each time
my wife and I enter a restaurant and the hostess says, “Hi, you guys. How many
in your party?” Aaughhhh! Then the server (politically correct for waiter or
waitress) says, “How you guys doing?” Forget that missing verb. It’s the you guys that agravates me.
Try as I may, try
as I might, I can't remember which grade I was in or the teacher's name, but I
do remember what she taught us.
Recall the chart
in your English workbook that asked you to fill in the plurals of these five pronouns?
1st Person
Singular: I 1st Person Plural: ______
2nd Per.
Sing: You 2nd Person
Plural: ____
3rd Per.Sing: He/she/it 3rd Person
Plural: ____
You
could have answered the First Person Plural with: me and her, or him
and me, as in, “Me and her go to school.” Or as in, “Him and me
study English.” While understandable, those would be wrong. Correct answer? We.
“We go to school,” and, “We study English.”
The Second
Person Plural is tricky, I admit. Since I spent a large part of my childhood
growing up in Florida, I was often confronted by the various attempts of my young
southern brethren to solve this puzzle. The most common usage was y'all,
a contraction of you and all. The problem is, y'all must certainly express
First Person Singular because the plural of y'all is all y'all. I
hope I didn't confuse all y'all.
Another
contender for Second Person Plural is you guys. Guy and guys have a
friendly Southern feeling about them. One day, as a newcomer to 1940s Florida, I recollect
trying to ingratiate myself with the boys in my third grade class. I plopped
myself down at a table, opened the paper bag lunch I’d toted to school, looked
around and said, “You guys sure do
like yer grits.” Well, I got my ass kicked during the next recess period.
Several times. And I distinctly remember
the phrase, “All y'all damn Yankees need to go back up north where you come
from.”
Well, if you're
still with me, the correct answer for Second Person Plural is: (ta-dah) You.
Singular and plural: Unadorned you.
A
giant leap for mankind is required for this next sojourn into proper pronoun usage.
He/she/it are not pluralize as hes/shes/its by simply affixing an S as we do
with nouns such as cow/cows, pig/pigs and aardvark/aardvarks. No, the answer is
not yourn either, which is the
Southern variation for the possessive pronoun your. I remember a quip from the
Red Skelton radio days when someone said, “You can call me Pee Pee cause I’m
all yourn.” Anyway, the correct answer for Third Person Plural is they.
For this egregious
trip into the past, I’ll ignore gender and possessive pronouns and the archaic pronoun
forms. It was hard enough getting this far.
As for you guys, I keep threatening to cut my
tips to servers if they even breathe the word guy or any variation thereof. You
guys can thank my wife for my continuing generosity.
