"man" vs. "guy" redux

[sagehen]

 Larry Horn quoting from  2000 LSA paper on he-man language:

>"...the creeping sex-neutrality of gyu(s) in vocative contexts (hey,
>guys!) and increasingly in referential contexts (one of the guys).
>This development-radiating outward from the now well-established you
>guys as a colloquial sex-neutral second person plural pronoun
>competing with you all, y'all, and youse to the increasingly attested
>guys as an informal substitute for people or folks (in both male and
>female speech) to its still somewhat marginal use as a trendy
>sex-neutral singular .........."
~~~~~~~~
While in a satirical piece I wrote for a little mag in 1998 argued for a
return to epicenity of "Man, men, he, him and  his" on the grounds that the
real language  problem was just that XY type homo sapiens  didn't have  a
set of nouns and pronouns that belonged only to them, I can now see another
way out of the vexing problem of providing the language with a good neutral
set:  "A guy" and "a guy's"  can be substituted for "he or she", "him or
her"; "his or her", "his or hers." Of course, we're already doing this
quite a lot, we just need to stop mumbling, blushing & giving little
knowing nods  when doing it in formal discourse!
A. Murie