Color me irritated when we at the company were advised not to use it anymore by our inclusiveness people.
"not considered non-inclusive by any Australian I know" does not mean "not considered non-inclusive by any Australian". You've just given an example of the type of response that you and potentially some of your colleagues might give to people attempting to raise this issue. How many people you know might accurately predict that that would be your response, and thus not raise the issue because it would cause strife?
Inclusiveness is not exclusively an "American" issue, nor is it a matter of being "easily offended". Someone raising this issue to you may not be expressing offense; they may be expressing a desire to include people.
(This is not an argument specifically for "folks"; I fully agree that you shouldn't necessarily adopt a specific replacement term if that term doesn't make sense locally. Perhaps there's an inclusive term that does make more sense locally, to avoid having something that feels like a loanword.)
The term 'hey guys' may very well be materially 'inclusive' enough that it doesn't warrant intervention necessary.
In much the same way 'landlord' is not materially a non-inclusive term either.
If you want to split hairs, it's a never ending problem, the sweater will come apart.
Some people draw the line at 'hey guys' - some people draw the line at 'landlord'.
And FYI - your statement about 'Inclusivity is not an American problem' reeks of ugly cultural Imperialism. Though there's surely a kernel of truth, more than likely the applied manner will boil down to 'Americans version of everything at the remote office' - which is paradoxically might be 'exclusionary' of other cultures, like those in Australia.
A better approach might be to let Australia figure it out on their own.
That's not a decision made unilaterally by speakers and writers of the language; it's a decision made by those listening and reading, as well. You can't decide how your words are perceived; you can only choose what words you use.
> Some people draw the line at
Some people don't think of language in terms of "lines", as though saying "fine, this far, but no further". Language is a living, changing thing; every piece of it is interpreted in varying ways by different people, and those ways change over time. Using it, like many other human interactions, is an exercise in modeling others around you, and the net effect you want your communication to have to its many audiences, and the environment that communication will create, and all the connotations it may convey. When trying to record that in a dictionary, it may round to a few broad buckets or categories, but the language as it lives in people's heads seems more continuous than discrete.
That's true of all communication, not just specific words. If you tried to plot individual words or phrases in meaning-space, some of them would have fairly sharp well-identified points where the majority of people agree, and some of them would have fuzzier boundaries, and some of them would have multi-modal distributions. And even that oversimplifies, because it's entirely possible to model people at multiple depths, "this is what the speaker means when they're saying it, this is what parts of the audience are hearing, this is what other parts of the audience are hearing", such that your own model of some communication is a mental model of many interpretations.
This pattern applies in many different cases, and people do it all the time: predicting whether your audience is likely to know a particular piece of jargon from your field and comparing that to the value of the jargon or the need to define/explain it; accurately conveying levels of confidence/certainty/uncertainty; considering whether your audience will know a meme; attempting to come across as professional; choosing the right vocabulary level for the audience; making a new piece of terminology; naming a program or project; making a pun.
Yes, that's the usual argument that comes up at some point in those discussions: "Language has always been changing", etc etc.
What this glosses over, in my opinion, is that there are vastly different ways how language changes. Language is always changing on its own, simply because the way people talk is constantly evolving: Today's slang might become tomorrow's high language and todays high language will probably feel hilariously stilted and old-fashioned a few generations on.
It's something completely different to deliberately alter language: Encourage or discourage certain words or even languages, replace words with others, etc. Historically, that has always been closely tied to politics, power struggles and battles between opposing narratives, and I don't think it's different here.
> And even that oversimplifies, because it's entirely possible to model people at multiple depths, "this is what the speaker means when they're saying it, this is what parts of the audience are hearing, this is what other parts of the audience are hearing", such that your own model of some communication is a mental model of many interpretations.
Fully agreed, and I think you should always tune a presentation to your particular audience - but I think especially then, it's telling that Google Docs isn't even asking what your audience is. They are giving suggestions that they believe to be absolutely true, no matter which audience you are writing for.
Yes, the Australians can make that choice, not Google.
That's the point.
How other people feel is not something anyone can control. If someone is clearly addressing a group you are a part of, and clearly means to include you in their address to the group, and you decide to feel "othered" because of this term or that term, that is your problem. You need to re-evaluate how you feel. People feel all sorts of ways about everything. Sometimes your feelings are wrong.
Yes, but this is a vastly more fuzzy criterion than the original one. What does "feeling included" mean? Who has the authority to declare how a group "feels" about something? Who even belongs to that group?
E.g., it might very well be the case that australian women did feel included when the term "guys" was used, because that was what they grew up with.
Guys is used as a generic term in all English speaking countries except the US. It’s used by women to refer to groups, including exclusively female groups.
It is the US that’s out of step here (colour me surprised). Stop trying to force US English on the rest of the world.
This is true in large parts of the US too. There are regional dialects where this is not true, but it is not a general feature of American English.
It is in the U.S. too.
[0]: https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
It doesn't help that it's all phrased in moral terms. Managers there don't get any sense of morality from their work so they're extremely vulnerable to being told that they have to do X to be a moral person. They don't know how to push back and say "actually, my behaviour is moral, your behaviour is immoral, unacceptable and you will now be fired for it". Also: firing is a decentralized process and means fighting HR.
US is bombing some Middle Eastern country which has nothing to do with 9/11. But the issue of the day for Americans is how inclusive is "guys". US was funding a lab in China where COVID might have come from. Don't worry, the issue of the day is whether a 4 year old should be able to transition to another gender. So some Americans can feel good about their moral superiority.
Given that they can get away with practically whatever they want otherwise (look at how many people are still running Windows despite the completely unacceptable behavior by Microsoft) why wouldn't they do things that result in profit?
To sum up for anyone else who wants to avoid it, the whole argument is that culture drives consumption, and it's better for the elites to have a homogenous population who all consume the same things, and that "woke capital" is an attempt by the elites to coerce the populace into homogenizing.
It's basically the "gay agenda", but now rich people are behind it.
Not to mention that meanings can evolve over time a great deal. If these types of corrections become common place I'm not sure what all of the ramifications will be but I suspect they will be bad on the whole.
I've lived all over the US and learned to code switch the regional dialects. I've never seen anyone get upset about someone not using the local default collective term in good faith. Trying to get Americans to speak the same version of English is a futile task.
It is in 99% of America, too.
It's just a few angry self-important people who like to shout on the internet who are happy to tell you otherwise.
"There is not always a counterpart", means that you recognize there is (at least) sometimes a counterpart. And in English, (unlike say, French or Spanish), the fact that so few words are gendered means that it's actually relevant when they are. Guys is masculine, Gals is feminine.
There are actually unambiguously non-gendered plurals "y'all", "them", "yins". Some of these are colloquial, but their existence also points to the fact that there are groups that weren't served exlusively with the gendered "guys".
Gals comes across as even more old fashioned than actress in my region - it's a term that feels like it walked out of a movie old enough that it had to advertise that it had colour.
Sometimes, as the world evolves, gendered terms get replaced by new gender neutral terms. Sometimes the meaning evolves in different ways (e.g. doctor and nurse are no longer gendered equivalents of each other, as the division in roles has continued to be useful even after the gender stereotypes as to who does those roles slowly fades). And sometimes one term just subsumes the other.
And sometimes, these changes happened many decades ago in other countries that are not yours. It's not very inclusive to expect those people to defer to American expectations of those terms.
The phrase "you guys" is attempting to be evolved, by parties who use it currently, and don't want to change their behavior to be explicitly inclusive. I'm not going to speak to what's okay in other countries, but the English definition of Guys is from Guy Fawkes, and is intended to mean a man. I would be surprised if the etymology of that weren't the same for Australia, which was also a British colony.
But the last thing I will point out, is that it's not on the in-group "men" to say whether or not they're excluding people. It's the people who are being excluded who get to make that determination for whether or not they feel like there are barriers for them. So when men say "you guys" is inclusive, they're saying "I don't want to change my behavior, so this now includes everyone." And the thing that's being ignored is that there are people who don't agree that they are included in that phrase.
Most of the replacements you cited are regional:
- Y'all is Southern/AAVE.
- Them is third-person, whereas "you guys" is second-person.
- "Yinz" is from Pittsburgh.
- I'm gonna throw in "youse," one of my faves, which is from New Jersey/Philly.
"Guys" is clearly gendered, whereas "you guys," I'd argue, generally isn't--especially in the Northeast US. I frequently hear cis women refer to groups of entirely cis women as "you guys."
This isn't meant as a view of what the ideal state of the English language is (bring back "thou!"), but these discussions frequently involve people talking past each other, and conflating "you guys" (second-person plural, arguably gendered) with "guys" (third-person plural, usually gendered). Effectively replacing "you guys" is a more challenging task, since there isn't a universally agreed-upon alternative, at least in the US.
I'll leave it to others to figure out what that alternative should be, though I will note that I, as a WASP from the Northeast, sound completely ridiculous saying "y'all."
The recognition that "Guys" is gendered, means that "you guys" will read as gendered to people. And that it will be necessarily exclusionary if you don't identify that way. It's worth noting that "you" is gender neutral and plural on its own. So it's hard for me to accept that adding a gendered word to a non-gendered one magically takes away the gendering. Also, the only people I ever see complaining about having to change this are people who fall into the group that's definitely included in "you guys".
Me <- WASP from Northwest that adopted y'all later in life, because it's just fun to say, and completely unambiguous.
(for anyone who doesn't get the reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7nFEnFtvCM)
Fortunately, Austin isn't representative of the majority of Texas, or America. It's like Portland, but with better weather.
(Just last week I learned that "Keep Austin Weird" predates "Keep Portland Weird" by five years.)
> Hey folks, what's the status of that document?
Just means the people being addressed.
> Are your folks coming to dinner?
is, "Are your parents coming to dinner?"
Wiktionary lists both as definitions: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/folks#Etymology_1
https://www.politico.com/story/2014/08/john-brennan-torture-...
Using "folks" (especially in the plural) to mean people can be rather "folksy", though, and I wouldn't be too surprised if some textbook or dictionary mentioned just the "parent" definition. Did you learn it this way as a second language, or as a native speaker somewhere non-American?
The English language doesn't offer many gender-inclusive alternatives, like the Spanish ustedes or the German ihr. With no good phrase for the plural of 'you,' the plural term 'guys' ended up evolving into the colloquial alternative to refer to a group of people, regardless of whether group members are male or female.
However, Reuters Graphics explains that “people who speak languages with stronger gender associations tend to have stronger gender stereotypes, a 2020 study of 25 languages found. A 2021 study in Israel showed that when women were addressed in a math exam using male pronouns, their scores were low. When they were correctly identified with feminine pronouns, scores rose by a third.”
But many people quite fairly still see 'guys' as a gendered word—the dictionary defines the singular 'guy' simply as 'man.' Sherryl Kleinman, a former professor at the University of North Carolina, discusses in her 2002 essay Why Sexist Language Matters that gender-specific language like 'guys' can affect even children:
"I worry about what people with the best of intentions are teaching our children. A colleague’s five-year-old daughter recently left her classroom crying after a teacher said, “What do you guys think?”. She thought the teacher didn’t care about what she thought. When the teacher told her that of course she was included, her tears stopped. But what was the lesson? She learned that her opinion as a girl mattered only when she’s a guy. She learned that men are the norm." - Sherryl Kleinman, Why Sexist Language Matters
Even though most people who use the term don't do so with the intent of it being sexist or exclusive of women, it can and often does cause women to feel left out of the conversation. Imagine you used 'gals' to refer to a room full of men and women—do you think the men would respond?
- Taken from https://www.hotjar.com/blog/gender-inclusive-language-workpl...
> I don't want to see the Americanisation (or worse, San Franciscoisation) of all Western cultures.
I've started observing that fixes for American problems are rolled out globally. For instance, the default branch of VCS repos being recommended to be changed from "master" to "main". Totally out of context where I'm from.
No, because the point of inclusiveness in this context is to be inclusive of humans and human cultures, not words. Excluding words which themselves exclude humans leads to the inclusion of those no longer excluded humans. It isn't difficult.
That argument has been used to defend all sorts of terms, some worse than others. The example you choose "guys" as gender neutral is also common in US english. But being common does not mean it is correct (racial and homophobic slurs were also common for a long time).
- Group of women === "girls"
- Group of men === "guys"
- Group of women with one guy === "guys"
- Group of men with one girl === "guys"
The "guys" as gender neutral is clearly the result of patriarical society. But does that make the word _harmful_? Hard to say. I lean towards "no". But I'm not in the adversely selected group.
your chart should be
- Group of women === "girls","guys"
- Group of men === "boys","guys"
- Group of women with one guy === "guys"
- Group of men with one girl === "guys"
you could call a group of women either a gendered collective noun or "guys". for a mixed group, you can't use a gendered collective noun. obviously.
But, bring that to the US and greeting a black american with "boy" has a very different connotation. And there's totally valid reasons to do with local historical conditions that means that this is inappropriate to use in that context.
Does that make it wrong for people in my home town to greet each other like that? I don't think so. I think it's very uninclusive for Google to impose an american context where there is none.
In the same way the term “boy” is never really used insultingly, but people use “girly” or “stop being a little girl” as an insult all the time. So it makes sense that you wouldn’t be offended by the similar term, but some women may not like girls so much. I think this is reasonable and treating people how they want to be treated is the ultimate goal.
There’s also what I’ll call the Jeremy Clarkson ooo hello ladies, reserved for fancy done up groups of ladies in nice dresses and hats for example from the country woman’s association.
Distinct from the oooo hello ladies of a group of prostitutes making their grand entrance from the back of a hummer I recently saw in the breaking bad movie.
Boys I’ve seen used a lot referring to groups of men in the examples of dogging the boys at a construction yard, pulled the boys for an scv rush in sc2, hello boyyys for Roy and HG implying something rude.
No it isn't, there is nothing clear about this nor is it true in any way that actually means anything.
I will always without a doubt start off by saying "Hey guys, xyz".
Absolutely incredible, it's like you've never spoken to a group of women before. Go call them girls and see what they think.
We have no issues regrading inclusivity. Most people are very polite and dont have issue. Please (Google, Big Tech) stop pushing your agendas on other countries.
But that's just me, you are totally correct I've seen lots of people do it without any complaints what so ever.
Equally, I can not say "hey" and just say what I want to say, so what? I can also say "hello" instead of "hey". Your point proves nothing in this context, though I'm sure you like to think it did.
Note that responses are, well, responses, hence there is the handy "parent" feature. But thanks for illuminating the world of possibilities that speech holds!
Furthermore:
"Hey everyone" - Too formal, I want don't want it to sound like an instruction to the group, just who cares to listen in that group of women
"Hey there" - Might be mistaken for a specific person if I happen to glance at them, I want to refer to the whole group (if they want to hear it)
"Hey" - See above.
I'll stick with "Hey guys", thanks!
I worked at an Australian tech company that expanded its offices into USA tech hubs. Very quickly our American staff started complaining about non-inclusive phrases commonly used at the company - phrases like "guys" instead of "folks". In Australia "guys" is a gender-neutral term when used collectively. It's very commonly used and not considered non-inclusive by any Australian I know. But of course they forced the change and the word "guys" was effectively retired from conversation there.
Is it more inclusive to force an Australian company of largely Australian employees to adopt an American culture because of a few easily offended Americans on staff? Or is that less inclusive? It seems like forcing people to drop their own cultural affectations and assuming that your American ones are the de facto correct ones is (in a small way) rather imperialist.
Yes this is a minor example on the scheme of things. But I think it's illustrative.