Just wanted to share John McWhorter's email newsletter from today, because I imagine the views on this will be mixed and interesting. Copy-pasted below:

“You guys” speaks volumes

By John McWhorter

Remember the ad that Donald Trump ran accusing Kamala Harris of being “for they/them” while he proudly claimed to be “for you”? I was surprised to see grammar take the lead on issues influencing a presidential election. But pronouns have a rich history as fighting words, and “you” is an especially personal one; it can be at once simple and accusatory, depending on the context. Those Trump ads put me in mind of another such controversy over the use of “you”: “you guys” when it’s directed toward women.

Audrey Bilger, the president of Reed College, might have put this debate on the map in 2002, with an influential call to stop using “you guys” as a term of address for women, writing that “calling women ‘guys’ makes femaleness invisible.” That idea found some traction in the tech industry, among other places; one start-up invited employees to put a dollar in a glass jar each time they used the phrase in this manner. The novelist Alice Walker said the use of the term to refer to women reflected a “fear of being feminine.”

Some of those critics advise us to substitute “you all,” “all,” “folks” or “people.” Some have even suggested “y’all,” a word that reads as much too slangy, regional or what you might even call ethnic to ever gain universal acceptance.

From my observation of the speech patterns of girls and young women — including my daughters and students — I think “you guys” is a horse too far out of the barn to be roped back in. For one thing, as some of the critics note, many of the people who use “you guys” to refer to women are themselves women. (Same goes for “dude” and even “bruh,” as in “brother.”) Trying to stop them or anyone else from speaking this way would be like trying to stop people from saying, “And I was like ….”

Since at least the 18th century, language pedants have insisted that “he” can refer to men and women alike. Writing in 1745, Anne Fisher, the first grammarian known to have laid out the case, wrote that “the masculine person answers to the general name, which comprehends both male and female; as, any person who knows what he says” — or, in short, that “he” encompasses everyone. Psychological experiments have since proved otherwise, confirming that a masculine pronoun primes people to think primarily of men.

But “you guys” does something different, having traveled a well-worn pathway from a word with a specific, fixed meaning into something more — an element of grammar. Consider how we use “going to” as marking future action. William Chaucer would have been mystified to hear us say, “I’m going to remember that the next time.” It would have made no sense: In Middle English, “to go” meant to embark on a journey to a physical destination.

So if one of Chaucer’s contemporaries said, “I’m going to buy some eggs,” she was referring to her passage down the road in order to make the purchase. But since she hadn’t gone yet, she was also, by implication, speaking about the future. Over time, that implication became explicit. Thus Restoration Britons started using “going to” for things unrelated to moving their bodies through space, as in, perhaps, “I’m going to keep sitting right here.” Today “going to” does the same kind of thing as “will,” marking the future tense. “Go” became grammar.

“Guys” has undergone a similar transformation. The word has come to mark “you” as plural (note that we don’t say “you guy”), a very handy grammatical function that many other languages address with a single pronoun. “Guys” can still mean “a collection of men,” but it also means something quite different. It’s not the only example of a word that has evolved in completely divergent ways. Another is the N-word, which occurs in two versions: one a vicious slur, the other a term of affection. The kinder version emerged from the other, but it is not the same word at all.

But why “guys”? We wouldn’t address a room full of men as “you girls.” One reason is that English lacks a warm, relatable word for women. “Ladies” is dainty. “Sisters,” beyond Black English, sounds like nuns. “Gals” is a touch comic and perhaps a tad vintage — a little hair spray and Jell-O molds, to my ear.

Another reason is that English is, in general, somewhat pronoun starved. Other languages almost always have a richer array. In Hebrew, for example, the plural pronoun for “you” comes in both a masculine and a feminine form. Old English had “thou” for singular “you” and “ye” for plural “you” and even special words meaning just “we two” and “you two” (“wit” and “git”). Now we’re down to just “I,” “you,” “he,” “she,” “it,” “we” and “they” as subjects. It’s amazing that we make do with such a spare set. If an option for a plural “you” arises, it is natural for people to take it up.

When women call one another “you guys,” “dude” or “bruh,” I don’t hear a fear of being women. They have sapped the gender from a masculine word in order to use it for their own purposes. I hear it as progress.