When someone from Britain speaks, Americans hear a "=?iso-8859-1?q?British=09accent?="...

[Terry Hancock]

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