RebKell's Junkie Boards

[Jdub]

I thought "y'all" was singular and "all y'all" was plural.

Arguments about "person-to-person" vs "man-to-man" are in my view just silly. I, being lazy, usually just call it "man" defense.

BTW, I have heard some female women's basketball coaches call their players "guys".

[pilight]

[summertime blues]

"Y'all" is plural. "All y'all" is a little more than that; it is generally used in addressing a group, and is used for particular emphasis. For instance, a coach might say to her players, "Y'all are going to play Tennessee tonight, and y'all know they are tough, but *all y'all* have to be watching out for Carter, because she will steal the ball right out of y'all's hands."

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Don't take life so serious. It ain't nohows permanent.
It takes 3 years to build a team and 7 to build a program.--Conventional Wisdom

[huskiemaniac]

[dtrain34]

Interesting to see the etymological discussion that broke out in part from my comment about Geno's use of "guys" beyond simply exhorting the troops with a "let's go, guys."

I am an outlier in this discussion -- not from Geno's beloved NE or the rest of y'all's South -- from California. Men and women will definitely say "you guys" in speaking TO a group of women, but generally in the west when the group is being referred to in the third person, a coach of either gender would call them "the young women" or "my girls." Players would call them every which thing, including various terms, polite and otherwise, for women or racial identifications if a team is predominantly non white.

I coached four years of high school girls basketball and have watched women's basketball since '99 or so because of a child who still plays and can never recall anyone coming to me and saying "Coach, the GUYS want to wear the black road uniforms this Friday" it would be "the girls" or "the team."

But, like, dude, we may be different out here.

[norwester]

What dtrain says resonates with me, where I grew up in the west, and have lived the past couple decades in the Pacific Northwest. Linguistically, I've often tested out as mid-California in my speech (Fresno?).

Technically, if you accept that language is static from the "Guys and Dolls" era, then I guess you could say guys is masculine-only. I know growing up and even now if I'm addressing a female, mixed or male group of people I'll say "you guys" or "hey, guys". But like dtrain I wouldn't refer to a group of women I was representing as guys, but I'd probably also remain gender neutral (i.e. not use "girls, ladies, women", etc., but rather say "team" or "players). And I recognize the Jersey and other regional uses as well.

I don't mind if folks say person-to-person, but it is unwieldy. I do notice when it's described that women are playing "man to man" defense, but I use it myself. Maybe I'm saying "'man to 'man" meaning woman to woman, or human to human.

The distinction between the "lady" conversation and the "man to man" conversation is that "man to man" doesn't mean something less than, or confined to a certain state of being. Just like "guys" has become pretty gender-neutral, lady has gained the connotation of describing "well-behaved women", where those limits/definitions are set by a patriarchal society.

I agree with Queenie that in some ways English is very limited. For instance, I willfully defy my English teachers by using "their" as a gender-inclusive singular possessive in my speech.

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Don't you know the plural of "anecdote" is "data"?

[beknighted]