guys doesn't feel gendered anymore
like barely a shade depending on context
the main reason to ban using terms like guys and dudes is because it forces people to get creative with their group nouns.
Anything that increases the likelihood of someone saying "me hearties" is a good thing
That's why I use y'all, the ultimate gender neutral 2nd person plural. Given that English isn't my native language, it confuses the hell out of random Americans i meet.
yes but these decisions were made by a HR manager and those are the stupidest people on earth
this is how I use it and most people seem to get it :shrug-outta-hecks:
Ultimately, I see how folks could be bothered by it so I don't use it. However, I've been working on a bloomer sincerepost for here and in theory it hinges on the term "the good guys" and relies on the specific idiomatic use of that term in English. The "good guys" being the heroes of the story who have the correct intentions and motivations (long story short, us commies are "the good guys" and we should be proud of that). However, I consider it a gendered term so I don't want to use it. I've thought of saying "the good people" but that has waaay more religious culty vibes so I don't want to use that either. So I've just kinda sat on the idea. Linguistic suggestions welcome.
Language is a social construct. "Guys" being gendered or not is entirely subjective.
One day, I think this. I say that not only the concept of gender roles are a social construct, but the very idea of "man" and "woman", the "biological" stuff, is completely influenced by those constructs, and then go on to draw a dialectical materialist framing of gender.
The next day, I have to pick between the tiled room with urinals, and the tiled room without, and cry.
I wish the company boss or the board of directors would be as inclusive as they say they are. I bet most of the higher ups say slurs all the time.
Reminds me of the time a well-meaning HR person set up a Slackbot on the company slack that would ask you to use "woman" instead of "girl", not thinking of the literally dozens of legitimate times one would use the latter and would just serve to piss off everyone with stuff like the OP on a constant basis. It got so bad that a dozen women or so demanded it get taken down, after which they never tried anything like it again.
It implies the people being addressed are all dudes, unlike saying "dudes" which isn't gendered and can apply even to a group of all women.
It implies the people being addressed are all dudes, unlike saying “dudes” which isn’t gendered
I feel like guys is much less gendered than dudes but maybe this depends on where in the country you live/what accent you have. To me guys is a gender neutral pronoun at this point
It's short for "you guys", which is a neutral 2nd person plural pronoun used in many English dialects.
In spanish we have this whole movement insisting it is micro-discriminatory to use (intrinsically) gendered nouns or articles/pronouns, not as a deliberate misgender, but because the language is gendered per se.
For example, we have the plural pronouns "las" (for a group of all feminine-gendered nouns), and "los" (for either a group of all masculine-gendered or mixed nouns). The same happen with the plurals, if I say "las amigas" I mean the female friends, but if I say "los amigos" I can either be talking about all male friends or a group of male and female friends. So it follows that "feminine nouns are discriminated because unless there's a group of only feminine nouns, they would be misgendered".
Which is a stretch in my opinion, but I don't care because the proposed solution for this "micro discrimination" also addresses the problem of referring to non-binary people with intrinsically gendered pronouns:
Changing intrinsically gendered nouns and pronouns to the already existing in spanish non-gendered noun/pronoun termination: "e"
The pronoun "les" designs a group of nouns with no specified gender, and it already existed in spanish but with limited use (the topic is way more deep cuz linguistic is a fuck).
Then:
- "Los amigos" = The (male) friends
- "Las amigas" = The (female) friends
- "Les amigues" (ignore the u before the e, that's not part of this topic) = The friends
This leads to the rise of a lot of non-existent words, like "amigues", but it's easy for anyone to create, use and catch them; so talking in all gender-neutral is a bit of a game at first but then comes natural.
Is this actually important? Well it makes some people feel better so OK I'm gonna do it. Plus, it makes the reactionaries froth. :frothingfash:
In spanish, the letter G has two sounds depending on which vowel follows it, lets call them "soft G" and "hard G" (which sounds exactly like J).
So:
- ga
- go
- gu
all sound as "soft G"
but:
- ge
- gi
sound like "hard G" (just like "je" "ji")
But what if we want to pronounce soft-G "ge" or soft-G "gi"?
They "solved it" by saying "oh yeah soft-G ge and soft-G gi will be written as "gue" and "gui" and the "U" will be silent.
But that stupid cuz what if I want to say "gu-e" (soft G "gu" plus "e") how would I write that?
-- "uuuh well then to write soft G gu followed by "E" or "I" you'll have to put a dieresis on the U like this : güe güi"
-- "That's fucking stupid mate. Why the fuck does G must sound like J, just make it be monophonetic"
-- "I'm already dead and I wrote the dictionary so I won this argument"
“I’m already dead and I wrote the dictionary so I won this argument”
The Real Academia de la Lengua Española in a nutshell.
So when Peggy Hill says "Los estudiantes son mis amigos", not only is "amigos" gendered, but even an ostensibly gender-neutral term (estudiantes) gets gendered by the "los", yeah?
I remember when our "company slack" wasnt yet sanctioned by the company and was just a chat for our own small office. Holy shit we ran that into the ground. Literally every other world you type would trigger a chain of automatic gif replies.
Those were the times. At least they were fun, if a little annoying to sift through.
I have a whole rant about how corporations are bad at manipulating people in this one very specific way. Slack and Teams at a sufficiently large company are effectively small-scale social media networks. And if you want a community online to adopt a social norm, SOP is to provide educational resources on why the change is necessary and then use sockpuppets to model the intended behavior. Some corporations will even plant union busters in their new hire trainings to make it look like your peers are anti-union. So they understand the basic principle. But they just haven’t figured out how to replicate this dynamic on Slack because it’s kinda hard to create convincing sockpuppet coworkers in Slack.
My company's slack has a locked channel dedicated to shitting on management's idiotic decisions :sicko-yes:
they can, but the company was acquired by a bloodsucking private equity firm that's running the place into the ground. They don't really give a shit about what goes on in slack and the people with admin permissions hate them just as much as everyone else
also they barely give a shit unlike the union busting which is a priority
Slackbot yells at me for cursing, and I want to execute it in response.
This made me think of that scene in Tron where the MCP is de-rezzing all the non-compliant programs.
A noun is something that refers to something independent of the context. Think: "9/11", "American war crimes in Vietnam and Korea", and "Guantanamo bay". The thing(s) it's referring to doesn't change depending on who you're speaking to (the context).
A pronoun is something that refers to something dependent on the context. Think: "He", "She", "They", and "You". The thing(s) it's referring to depends on who you're speaking to or about (the context).
'Guys' is a pronoun as the thing (people) it's referring to changes depending on who you're speaking to.
There are a lot of books in the world so anytime I use the word "book" you have to use context to know which one I'm talking about. It's still a noun (as is "guy").
Sure, "book" and "guy" may be improper nouns. "Guys" ('guy' plural) may also be an improper noun but when used to refer to the group of people you're speaking towards (as in "guys I'm trapped in the elevator"), it's used as a pronoun.
It could also be argued that "guys" used in that context isn't a noun or pronoun at all but rather just a filler word as it doesn't communicate any meaning (you are implicitly talking to the people you are talking towards).
