"guy'' NOT ''guys''

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:12 AM -0700 6/15/07, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>On Jun 15, 2007, at 8:49 AM, Jon Lighter wrote:
>
>>Nobody in his or her right mind would use singular vocative "guy"
>>to a female.
>
>my feeling also, but just wait...
>
>there's a series of male vocatives that have developed uses as
>exclamations: first "boy", then "man", and now, i think, "dude".  i
>have heard "dude" used by one woman to another, in a context where i
>really couldn't tell whether it was vocative or exclamatory.
>
There are a number of such instances recorded and discussed in Scott
Kiesling's recent AmSp paper on "dude".  The Language Log link,
including a nice cartoon, is at
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001701.html.

LH

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