Fo shizzle, ‘you guys’ should not be recognised

Colin Randall on why the gender-neutral phrase 'you guys' should not be added to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Voluntourism, where a holiday is combined with philanthropic work, is one of the new words creeping into the dictionaries. Sarah Dea / The National

From the Oxford English Dictionary’s arbiters of language comes another crop of additions, nearly 500 new words and more than 900 revised or updated ones.

Those who derive enjoyment from showing exaggerated horror at linguistic carbuncles will not be disappointed.

Among several unlovable newcomers, intersectionality has been snatched from mathematical jargon and may now refer to “the interconnected nature of social categorisations such as race, class and gender”.

From Canadian usage comes stagette, for a bride-to-be’s hen party.

South Africa contributes tenderpreneur, someone who uses political connections for personal business advantage. It is not clear who is to blame for voluntourism, a combination of holidays and charity work, but we have OED’s word for it that fo’ shizzle, meaning “for sure”, reaches us from rap and hip-hop slang.

To minor relief, the now-ubiquitous use of “guys” in a gender neutral sense, for any group of people of either sex or a mixture, has not yet received the dictionary’s blessing. Oxford University Press, which publishes the OED, says it remains “under revision”, though it already appears in its online dictionary.

In 2007, a woman writing for the US internet magazine alternet.org devoted nearly 1,000 words to discussing whether the usage was right, wrong or of no importance.

Heather Gehlert described the excruciating start to lunch dates with her father. Almost without fail, the server would address them as “you guys”. Without fail, her father would bridle, retorting: “Excuse me, but I only see one guy here.”

Naively hoping the usage would not cross the Atlantic, I took a while to share his irritation.

Even now, when the phrase is hard to avoid in any English-speaking country, my aversion takes a mild form. I make no scene. Unless one of my daughters or, worse, my six-year-old grandchild is the culprit, I say nothing at all. I bridle to myself.

Guy, to me, is an exclusively male word. “Am I right in thinking it is the only noun in English whose gender depends on whether it is singular or plural?”, a kindred spirit asked at The Economist’s website.

Americans were perfectly entitled to develop a parallel English language full of their preferences and refinements. But they do have a habit of exporting them to the rest of the English-speaking world; “you guys” is no exception.

It is not the only word or expression to make me cringe. Nor am I alone in having pet peeves.

In a magazine in the dentist’s waiting room, I found a feature entitled “the word I would ban”. Ten women, mostly writers or broadcasters, had been asked for nominations. All but two chose examples that arguably devalued females.

Caitlin Moran, a journalist and author, wanted “pampering” removed from dictionaries because it had become a euphemism for the torture of beauty treatments.

Sali Hughes, a writer and broadcaster, favoured banishing “bitch”, loathing it as “as a fast way of unfairly dismissing women you’re intimidated by”.

Votes were also recorded against “spinster” – “in this day and age, there’s nothing wrong with being single” – and even “control freak”, which meant no more to Jane Fallon, a television producer, than “doing your job properly”.

As for “you guys”, resistance is pointless. Erin McKean, a lexicographer, agrees. “Whether from a dearth of suitable alternatives or just from habit, ‘you guys’, if not completely entrenched, is well on the way to being the standard casual way to address a group,” she writes at the Boston Globe’s website.

“Rather than fight that battle, we may want to save some indignation for the next awkward form of address to surface. I’m thinking it’s probably ‘dudes’.”

Colin Randall is a former executive editor of The National