On Friday 07 October 2005 05:28 pm, Grant Edwards wrote: > Cool. While we're on the topic, has anybody else noticed that > "guys" is acceptible and commonly used to refer to a group of > women,
Yeah, though it depends on where you are. > but the singular "guy" is never used to refer to a > single woman (and most of the women I've asked think that "gal" > or "gals" is insulting). Again, that depends on where you're at, I think. > Likewise, "dude" is often used when > addressing a female but almost never This I have never witnessed. That's bizarre. > when speaking about one in > the third person. > > The question was a bit broken, it did not list "all y'all" and its > > most glaring omission was "yous guys" The Philly responders selected > > the next best option of "yous" I don't think "all y'all" is really a plural you form -- it's just agreement between modifier and pronoun. Since "all" describes a group, the 2nd person pronoun must be plural "y'all". Now, I obviously haven't been everywhere (;-)), but in my experience, "All y'all" is used only to explicitly include a larger group, rather than a smaller one. In other words, it's just as you would use "all of you" in "proper" English. ;-) -- Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com ) Anansi Spaceworks http://www.anansispaceworks.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
