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

[Jonathan Lighter]

And check this out:

1959 Curtis L. Johnson _Hobbledehoy's Hero_ (Cleveland, O.: Pennington
Press) 505: "Well," he said, "it's none of your guys' business."

 https://archive.org/details/hobbledehoyshero0000unse/page/n7/mode/2up?q=%22guys%27+business%22
<https://archive.org/details/hobbledehoyshero0000unse/page/n7/mode/2up?q=%22guys%27+business%22>

Internet Archive dates this "1949," but the copyright date is clearly
"1959."

JL

On Fri, Jan 2, 2026 at 4:11 PM Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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."
>


-- 
"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