"guy''

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:03 AM -0700 6/15/07, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>HDAS:
>
>   1927 Eugene O'Neill, in _Sel. Letters_ 363: She is a "real guy."
>You'd like her immensely.
>
>   1929 Asch _Pay Day_ 14: Be a good guy, Ma, and wait a couple of days.
>
>   1934 Duff & Sauber _20 Million Sweethearts_ (film): She'll
>understand. She's a great guy.
>
>   Etc., etc.
>
>   Obviously these particular exx. include adjs. and are to some
>degree figurative, but the fact remains that they refer to a female
>human being as a "guy."

And so much for self-assured claims like that in the 1983 AmSp note
to the effect that "guys" can only refer to women in vocative
occurrences. In Jon's examples, like mine earlier ("the other guy",
"the next guy", "the chosen guy", "I'm just one guy"), by the time
you get to "guy" the relevant content of the noun (= 'individual',
'person') is already established.  (Along the same lines, I should
retract my earlier self-assured, but incorrect, assertion that "she's
a nice guy" will not occur; there are in fact a couple of relevant
google hits for this collocation.)  There remains, I still maintain,
a palpable distinction between these cases with adjectives and
corresponding ones with relative clauses ("the guy in the next
office", "a guy I know"), which are (I dare to claim) necessarily
[+male].

LH

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