[Ads-l] "Your guys's garage..."

[Emily Gordon]

I had a hunch Ben Yagoda would have written about this, and I was right.
Here’s a piece in New York magazine from 2016 quoting Ben’s Lingua
Franca piece:

What’s beautiful about language is that people will modify it to suit their
needs, especially when the language is flimsy around a certain use case. In
contemporary English, the second-person plural sticks out awkwardly: How do
you address a group of people? *You guys, y’all, youse?* It gets even
flimsier in the possessive: How do you ask a group of people about
something of theirs, like their bathroom, their phone?

Well, as Ben Yagoda observes
<http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2016/11/01/your-guys-opinion/> at
the *Chronicle of Higher Education*’s Lingua Franca blog, you do what
Americans do best: innovate. Around the turn of this century, a new usage
popped into the vernacular: *Your guys’. *Like a caller ringing the
spectacular “Car Talk” radio show: “I wanted to get your guys’ opinion.” Or
in the millennial tour de force, *Napoleon Dynamite*: “Hey, can I use your
guys’s phone for a sec?” Or what Yagoda has as the earliest entry in Google
Books, from a 2002 novel called *Impeachment: *“Well, it is, but that is
your guys’s problem.”

New York magazine’s “The Cut”:
https://www.thecut.com/2016/11/your-guys-is-american-english-at-it-roughspun-best.html

Ben in Lingua Franca:
https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/your-guys-opinion


On Fri, Jan 2, 2026 at 3:55 AM Jonathan Lighter <
00001aad181a2549-dmarc-request at listserv.uga.edu> wrote:

> And they're still showing it. Is this a common thing? Am I the only one who
> cares?
>
> JL
>
> On Mon, Apr 24, 2023 at 3:40 PM Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > A commercial for the Ring Video Doorbell features a presumably
> > mockumentary lady ringing one to warn "Your guys's garage is on fire!"
> > (The accompanying caption spells it "Your guys'," but the pronunciation
> is
> > "Your guys's.")
> >
> > This sounds very weird to me.
> >
> > JL
> >
> > --
> > "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the
> truth."
> >
>
>
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org