Your guys's

[Kudo Masaki]

I use ya'll, I grew up in the south so I use that dialect.

That was pretty funny overall, I use guys's sometimes too. :/

[maruichan]

Speaking of dialect, Maryland people tend to use the term "These guys" when referring or talking about items. Like they might pick up something and go "These guys are for _______" or "Something like these guys". At first I thought it was my friend's term and she was just cheesy, but it seems to be a somewhat common saying up here.

Anyway, I am from TX. We use "y'all" "your guys" or "you people/you and your people". And it's Coke, not soda or pop.

[AJBryant]

Yeah, my regional term for "random soft drink" is "Coke" as well.

"What kind of Coke do you want?"
"Seven-Up."
"Okay."

Tony

[two_heads_talking]

Yeah, my regional term for "random soft drink" is "Coke" as well.

"What kind of Coke do you want?"
"Seven-Up."
"Okay."

Tony

I get all confused when someone asks me what kind of Coke I want. (especially since new coke failed and diet coke is just terrible.) I tell them I don't drink Coke and then ask them what kind of soda they have..

Anyway, I am from TX. We use "y'all" "your guys" or "you people/you and your people". And it's Coke, not soda or pop.

Being that Coke is a brand name, while soda or pop or soda pop are generic terms for those drinks. Thus we get the name Soda Jerk (or soda jerker if you are really specific)for the guy who used to provide those tonics as he mixed syrup and soda water and ice cream for an icecream soda.

http://www.sangabrielvalleymenus.com/sodajerks/

scroll down a bit and see what I mean.

http://popvssoda.com:2998/

here's a map that shows the concentration of soda vs pop vs coke when asking for a carbonated beverage. Of course, as Tony points out, Soft Drink is probably the most versatile and widely used generic term.

http://tastyresearch.wordpress.com/2006 ... a-vs-coke/

here's a good link that gives a good time line as to when what words showed up.. soda has been used since the 1500's

[arumanokokoro]

I think this is a regional problem. When staying in a rural part of Texas, we stopped for lunch with a large group of friends. The waitress inquired about when we would like to have our iced tea: before the food, or after the food? But it came out like this:
"Y'all want y'all's iced tea with y'alls meals, or do y'all want y'all's iced tea with y'all's salad"?

[Feba]

Kansan, strangely enough I pretty much never hear the whole "soda/pop/soda pop/soft drink" thing come up. People just say "drink", as in "What would you like to drink?". Even when I lived in Atlanta, I didn't hear it come up that often. Although I do distinctly remember someone saying "Pepsi Coke", and shivering.

I don't really have an opinion on the local usage of "your guys's", though. Personally I'd probably say "you all" to talk to a group. I'd only use "You guys" and "you girls" if it was a group of that gender. To refer to a group's collective possessions, I would probably revert to "your guys's" (pronounced like guises) though, if just using "your" would feel too imprecise.

[AJBryant]

I should say that once I lived in a state wherein one might frequently hear "y'inz" for "your(s)".

Dialect. She are a funny thing.


Tony

[two_heads_talking]

I should say that once I lived in a state wherein one might frequently hear "y'inz" for "your(s)".

Dialect. She are a funny thing.


Tony

don't forget y'unz (although I think I mentioned that earlier... maybe..)

[Oracle]

I should say that once I lived in a state wherein one might frequently hear "y'inz" for "your(s)".

don't forget y'unz

I've travelled to the US quite a bit and been in a few different regions but I've never come across either of those. Out of interest in which part of the country are they used?

Dialects and accents really are crazy things. i'm sure if all the native English speaker here could actually hear how each other talk we'd be more confused than ever!

[AJBryant]

NE Pennsylvania.

Tony

[chikara]

NE Pennsylvania.

Ahhh, Pensuvania

[becki_kanou]

NE Pennsylvania.

Ahhh, Pensuvania

Yup. Back in college I lived for about 3 months outside of Fluffia.

[two_heads_talking]

I should say that once I lived in a state wherein one might frequently hear "y'inz" for "your(s)".

don't forget y'unz

I've travelled to the US quite a bit and been in a few different regions but I've never come across either of those. Out of interest in which part of the country are they used?

Dialects and accents really are crazy things. i'm sure if all the native English speaker here could actually hear how each other talk we'd be more confused than ever!

Y'unz seems to be a southern VA, North Carolina or South Carolina dialect. Then you hit cajun territory and it all goes south at that point..

[Yudan Taiteki]

I was just listening to This American Life. One of the producers, Sarah Koenig, was doing a story about recovering in the wake of Katrina, and she was talking to someone from a small town in Louisiana (I think) -- she said "So wait, you saw people wearing, like, your guys's football jersies?" I think this is a pretty classic case where someone would want to use the explicit plural; the meaning of her question was "the football jersies of the team you coach" rather than "the football jersies you personally own". Not that this difference couldn't have been understood through context, but people aren't always that careful in spontaneous speech.

[Pops Finn]

I was delighted to find this group (or whatever it's called; I'm a little behind on web terminology) having a discussion of the phrase "your guys's", as it's one of my favorites among the little oddities that I collect in English usage (and in the usage of the 6 other languages I speak, unfortunately all Indo-European. I know almost nothing about Japanese except some verses of “Ue o muite arukō”, which was a hit for Kyu Sakamoto in 1963, when I first heard it.)


I think I can account for the expression well enough to satisfy even the official linguist(s) here.

First, although "they don't teach it in school", English personal pronouns can function as adjectives, as in “you idiot!” – and as in “you guys”.

(1) The “your” is a matter of grammatical anticipation.

(i.e., of what we can call “grammatical anticipation”; I don’t know the official linguistic term.) Because the adjective in “you guys” is the pronoun “you”, many people in speaking the phrase feel a tendency to anticipate the possessive case of the phrase as a whole by making the pronoun itself possessive. That tendency has increased since I first heard “you guys’s” some 20 years ago, before which time I think most gringos would say “Is that you guys’ dog?” if they were among those who used “you guys” as the 2nd person plural. If I utter that earlier form to myself I can’t really say for sure that I remember hearing it before I started noticing “your guys’s”, but that’s likely because there’s nothing remarkable about it.

[I should explain that I use the term “gringo” to mean a USA-ian whose forebears immigrated here long enough ago (probably 150 years or more) that he or she doesn’t think of belonging to any immigrant group. All the xenophobes who complain about immigrants are gringos, for instance, but then so am I. I’ve come to use this term because there doesn’t seem otherwise to be one for this class of people, and because it angers me to hear someone use “American” or “real American” or “regular American” so as to exclude relative newcomers. For that matter, I object when my South American friends use “American” to mean USA-ian, telling them, “But you’re American yourself, and so are Canadians. If anyone knows a good term for what I’m calling a USA-ian, or a better term than my “gringo”, I’d love to hear it.]


(2) The “Guys’s” comes a consequence of using “your”.

Once I’ve said “your”, if I complete the phrase as “your guy’s”, then it sounds like it means “your guy’s”, so that

Is that your guys’ dog?

would be likely to be heard as meaning

Does that dog belong to your guy?

instead of

Does that dog belong to you guys?

English speaker know well that adding an s sound to the end of a word indicates the possessive form, so to keep from being misunderstood here, someone whose changed the “you” to “your” will likely follow through by adding that sound. And that’s why they say.

Is that your guys’s dog?


I love little oddities like this particularly when they’re “wrong” because, as I’m fond of telling my college math students,

There ain’t no official right or wrong in English.

Most of them don’t know this, having had “rules” of “correct grammar” drilled into them by teachers since they were 6 years old. By contrast, there is an official right and wrong in French, determined by L'Académie française, which last I heard was still asserting that “un hamburger” and “le weekend” were not French. But the French themselves couldn’t care less about the pronouncements of these stuffy pedants, and almost no one says “la fin de la semaine”. But there never has been any such “learned body” for English, and if there were one in England, American speakers would disdain it, and vice versa.

It’s all really just a mater of opinion. But some opinions are more considered than others. My favorite commentary of English Usage is Fowler’s Modern English Usage, which I often read through for hours. It’s not always easy to find what you’re looking for in Fowler, because of his idiosyncratic labeling of topics. His comments on the possessive singular, for instance, are under the heading “Possessive puzzles”. But Fowler is the best. My favorite shorter reference is Strunk and White (i.e., The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White).

Pops