My Pronoun, ’tis of Thee

Abstract

Chapter 8 interrupts the narrative to explain the importance of the further development of “Guy” to “guy” or “guys.” It tells about the second-person personal pronouns of English from Old English times, a thousand years ago, to the present. These are words we regularly use in speech and writing: first-person singular “I” and plural “we,” third person “he, she, it” and “they,” and then the second person, which happens to have undergone major changes in the past few centuries. Originally the second-person singular was “thou,” the plural “you.” But then, like several other European languages, the second-person plural was seen as more polite than “thou,” so “you” became second-person singular too. That was fine, except now a listener couldn’t tell whether a speaker was referring just to the listener or to the whole group. So with “you” solidly entrenched as second-person singular, a substitute had to be found for second-person plural. One possibility was “y’all,” still preferred in the American South, but that can be used for the singular too. Eventually, while the vacancy remained empty two centuries later, a successful substitution emerged, none other than the “guys” most of use as second-person plural today.