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

[Jonathan Lighter]

Thanks, Emily. That 2002 ex. got me looking further.

1980 _Spokesman-Review_ (Spokane, Wash.) (Dec. 7)  A22 [Newspapers.com]:
The teens blinked the car headlights at the robber, and he pulled into a
tavern parking lot....He said, "What's your guys' problem? You following me
or something?"

That, of course, was 45 years ago - say, two generations?  I would have
said "You guys'" with one / z /.

Paul Brians, of Washington State [n.b.] University pointed this out in his
"Common Errors in English" so long ago as 2008, p. 227:

https://archive.org/details/common-errors-in-english-paul-brians/page/n227/mode/2up?q=%22your+guys%27s%22

JL

On Fri, Jan 2, 2026 at 3:19 PM Emily Gordon <
0000205244c4ee9d-dmarc-request at listserv.uga.edu> wrote:

> 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
>


-- 
"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