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

[Jonathan Lighter]

According to the dust jacket, Johnson was 31 in 1959 and grew up in
Minneapolis and Iowa City.

JL

On Fri, Jan 2, 2026 at 4:32 PM Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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."
>


-- 
"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