A small number of functions combine to account for the lion’s share of innovation to the language. There’s argot from a variety of subcultures, anthimeria, piquant grammatical solecisms (“One never knows, do one?”), the occasional neologism like gobsmacked, and, perhaps most productively of all, what I call creative redundancy. Thus listen gets juiced up to listen up, tweet to tweet out, “the most unkind cut of all” to “the most unkindest cut of all,” and “Raid Kills Bugs” to “Raid Kills Bugs Dead.”
I have been musing about one such redundancy ever since, several ago, I heard a caller to radio’s Car Talk say, “I wanted to get your guys’ opinion.” Not your (plural) or even you guys’, but your guys’ (I am interpolating the apostrophe). With two possessives--your and guys’ — I would term it a double genitive, in the manner of “a friend of his.” It was, in any case, no anomaly: I’ve heard the phrase a number of times since, and it shows up in reference works. Or at least in the user-generated Urban Dictionary, where in 2005 Weston Ruter defined your guys’s as “the possessive form of you guys” and, OED-like, offered three citations:
“I know that in your guys’s official bio from Warner that it says you would tour with anyone because your music touches so many genres.”
-LP Web, pushmeaway.com
“I still have about 30 lbs to lose, which I would love to lose in 3 months..and after reading all your guys’s stories I have gained even more motivation”
-Megan, Age 14, female (blubberbuster.com)
“Hey can I use your guys’s phone for a sec?”
-Napoleon Dynamite [2004 film]
In 2006, the Stanford linguist Arnold Zwicky wrote about your guys’ on Language Log, noting
I collected my first examples at the 2005 Berkeley Linguistics Society meeting, where one commenter on a paper referred repeatedly to your guys’ analysis. A little while later I heard Barry Bonds use this possessive (referring to the reporters at a press conference), then found piles of examples on the net, and collected some more examples from the speech of graduate students and colleagues.
I’ll add the two earliest quotes I found in the Google Books database. First, a line from a 2002 novel called Impeachment: “Well, it is, but that is your guys’s problem.” And this from a document identified as Title VI Land Transfer, South Dakota: Environmental Impact Statement, 2001: “I just want to briefly describe some of the background to this document so you folks that are community members and tribal members are going to be able to come up and give comments about how what they’re doing affects your guys’s lives and your guys’s rights.”
It seems reasonable to conclude that the phrase popped up in the vernacular around the turn of the century. That leaves the question, why?
I believe language innovations emerge in order to serve a purpose, fill a need, or, as in this case, solve a problem: the weakness of the standard possessive, you guys’. It is weak because, in speech, it sounds the same as the nonpossessive form, you guys. Of course, one could differentiate it by treating guys as if it were a nonplural ending in s, adding an extra syllable, and saying “you guises,” the way one would say “Jesusez” (for “Jesus’s”) or “the Jonezez” (for “the Jones’s”). The common orthographic rendition your guys’s would suggest this pronunciation. But (in my admittedly small sample) I’ve never heard it pronounced this way, probably because it sounds childlike, if not childish.
That leaves your guys’ — pronounced, as the Car Talk caller did, “your guise.” In my view, that’s a rather elegant solution.
[Addendum: I did an informal online survey asking people who used this possessive how they pronounced it. Two-thirds responded “your guys"; one-third, “your guises.”]
I’m well aware that I have ignored the larger issue of you guys, which some people find troubling, especially when referring to a group of females or people of mixed genders. There are certainly alternatives for the second-personal plural: y’all (the South), you lot (Britain), youse (my adopted city of Philadelphia), yinz (Pittsburgh) and the standard, ambiguous you. But personally, I am fine with you guys.
What’s your guys’ opinion?
