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

[Emily Gordon]

Nice work! Your guys' research skills never fail to dazzle me.

On Fri, Jan 2, 2026 at 1:33 PM Jonathan Lighter <
00001aad181a2549-dmarc-request at listserv.uga.edu> 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."
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

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