Tuesday, October 23, 2007
After moving, then what?
I found someone's "to do" list on the ground near our local post office parcel delivery substation thingy*. I was impressed by the extremely general nature of the items on the list. But my main thought was sympathy for the poor person who lost the list, sitting in a house full of boxes, with a hire van parked outside, and no idea what to do next:

TO DO!!!
Pack up house
Clean up
Collect van
Move
Unpack
Return van




* We "missed" a special delivery on Saturday because the weekend post officer didn't bother to ring or knock. So I had to cycle a couple of miles to the aforementioned post office parcel delivery substation thingy, then wait a half hour or so while they looked fruitlessly for the missing envelope. They were able to tell me many things I didn't care about, such as the fact that the weekend post officer only works on Saturday and has braids, and that the missing delivery was indeed returned to the post office at the end of rounds on Saturday. "So it's probably around here somewhere, or else someone has picked it up by mistake and might find it in their bag at the end of their rounds today". Grrrrrrrrr.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007 11:53:03 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [3]  | 
 Tuesday, October 09, 2007
You guys
For many Americans whose dialect doesn't include the handy pronoun "y'all" or "youse", the phrase "you guys" serves as a very handy second person plural of perhaps a rather informal register. But it also has the interesting property that, at least in this particular form, the word "guy" no longer necessarily refers to men. "You guys" can refer not only to a group of men, or a mixed group of men and women, but even to a group only of women:

I’m not here to make friends with you guys. -- contestant on season 7 of America's Next Top Model engaged in light conversation with some other (female) contestants.

As far as I know, UK English does not have a comparable phrase deployed in similar situations (although of course there's no shortage of ways to express second-person-plural should the need truly arise); the closest equivalent I can think of is "lads" which is obligatorily masculine.* Indeed, I've seen some female UK-ites take offense to being addressed as part of "you guys". This is no surprise, because it seems to me that only this particular use of "guy" permits female reference. (Not just "you guys". "Guys" can also stand alone in this manner when used for second person reference: "Guys, you'll never believe this forwarded email I just got")

For example, it would not sound at all right** to say "a guy" to refer to a female person (assuming one is not making a specific point about masculine appearance or manner, e.g. "one of the guys"). Plural "guys" also doesn't sound right when used to refer to a group ("All the guys were there. Bob, Mike, Tom, Donna, and Louise"). If I start talking about "sexy guys" there is no possibility that I am talking about a group that includes women. In fact, modifying "guys" with any sort of adjective seems to remove women from the equation, even in the pronoun(ish) sense:

"You guys" = can include women.
"You sexy guys" = doesn't include women.
"Sexy guys" = doesn't include women.
"You stupid guys" = doesn't include women.
"You female guys" = doesn't make sense.

Quantification, hmmmm, this seems OK in the female-permitted sense of "you guys", but only when used in the second person. Third person female guys are still a no-no:

"You three guys" = can include women.
"Three guys" = none of whom are women.

Of course this subject has attracted more scholarly attention, and at least to some, "you guys" is a hugely big deal. The excitement practically drips off the page in George Jochnowitz's 1983 article "Another View of You Guys" (appearing in American Speech, 1983) "The rapid spread of you guys through the United States during the last decade [i.e., the 1970s] is the only major change in the prononimal system of English that has occurred since the loss of thou and thee four centuries ago". At the time of writing, (Jochnowitz claimed) "you guys" was the most frequently used second person plural pronoun in the United States, although I'm not sure whether he includes the ambiguous "you" in his count. He also points out that the pronoun is somewhat broken compared to others (you can say "You linguists" but not "you guys linguists"). So, what do you guys think?


* There's a wikipedia entry here which (at the moment) claims that "chaps" is "increasingly used for people of either sex". But I can't think of any cases in which I've actually heard the word "chaps" used in this manner (except perhaps where someone has used it in a weak attempt at comic effect, complete with faux upper class accent).

** All judgments are according to my own intuition only. Your mileage may vary. If so please leave a comment.

*** How can I not mention Guy Fawkes, the etymological grandfather of "you guys"?

language
Tuesday, October 09, 2007 4:15:43 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  | 
 Thursday, October 04, 2007
Space issues

Overheard on the bus today:

HE: Are you saying you want me to give you some space? Cause I'll do that if that's what you want.
SHE: Yeah, that's what I want. Space.
HE: Well OK, you just had to say so.
SHE: Only, it has to be space with someone else in it. Not you.

OUCH!
Thursday, October 04, 2007 11:56:54 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [2]  | 
 Monday, October 01, 2007
Street furniture
This weekend the Dunces said goodbye to a couple of old friends, two large Ikea bookshelves (one "Leksvik" and one who-knows-what) which have been with us for ages and together offered us a dozen (much-needed) shelves of book storage. Unfortunately as we've moved the shelves from place to place, their structural integrity has gradually decreased (despite our efforts to take them apart very carefully, and just as carefully store all the hardware necessary to rebuild them successfully). And now they can probably be best described as "wonky"; they are fine if carefully propped in a corner, but tend to slouch if left to their own devices. But they've been happily slouching in the back bedroom for some months now, loaded with books and showing no signs of imminent collapse. Perhaps I've exaggerated their lack of structural integrity (although I'm irritated by their tendency towards "disposable", like many Ikea products [Sometimes you do get what you pay for]); the real problem is that they don't really fit anywhere in our flat. They've remained in our back room just because we've abandoned the room, leaving it as a disorganized storage area where we hang our clothes to dry, park an extra bike, and so on.

But now things are changing. Mrs. Dunce is spearheading the effort to make the room usable, which includes building a set of shelves* from floor to ceiling in a fairly wide alcove next to the chimney breast. These shelves should have just about as much capacity as the two bookshelves, and will allow us much more space in the room. So we dragged the two old shelves outside, leaving them next to the bins in the hope that someone else might consider them useful and take them away. I didn't think there was much chance; they looked even more wonky sitting on our crooked pavement in the front garden. But surprise, surprise, this morning they were gone. So now there's no going back. We have to build the shelves, or get rid of a dozen cartons of books!**


* We should be up to the job of shelf-building, having already completed a small test run in another room using the same style of shelf mounting.

** While I was clearing off the old bookshelves, I was also going through the books with an eye on getting rid of those we didn't need any longer. But I only found a dozen or so that I could really do without (to give you an idea of my hoarding tendencies, Battlefield Earth made the cut). So it was hardly worth making an effort to get rid of any books this time around.

house | read
Monday, October 01, 2007 2:57:05 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [2]  |