"guy'' NOT ''guys''

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Jun 15, 2007, at 5:46 PM, Larry Horn wrote:

> 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.

i was of course aware of scott's paper and the Language Log posting,
but didn't cite these because scott was looking for *a* gloss for
"dude".  (some of the discussion of vocative "guy", "buddy", "pal",
etc. on this list has been similarly directed towards a single gloss
for each item.)  that seems to me to be wrong-headed.  vocatives are
exquisitely socially-oriented lexical items, and we can expect them
to have a variety of uses, for different speakers and in different
contexts.  true, many of those uses will share some social features,
but we can also expect real divergence.

"boy" and "man" have certainly split. when i say, "Man/Boy, am I
tired!", i'm not using these words as vocatives; there is no
imputation of sex to the addressee(s), nor is anything conveyed about
the relationship between me and the addressee(s).  the words here are
purely exclamatory, working roughly like "wow" or "gee".  i don't, in
fact, use "boy" as a vocative at all (though there are people who
do).  i used to use "man" as a vocative on occasion, but i think that
went out with the 70s.  in any case, my observation was that i think
that "dude" has developed a purely exclamatory use for some speakers;
if so, there are occasions when scott's glossing of "dude" is just
incorrect.

arnold

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