“You guys’s”
Pronounced,
yoo guy ziz.
Example: A
cop at a traffic stop, addressing several people in car: “All right, I’m going
to need to see all you guys’s driver licenses.”
Forgive a little
pedantry to explain myself. I’ll be succinct. It boils down to a slight confusion
in the English language on how to pronounce the possessive of a plural noun.
Take, for
instance, the plural noun cats. There are a dozen cats at the animal shelter,
and it’s time to, I don’t know, wash their blankets. The “cats’ blankets” is
pronounced as “the cats blankets.” The apostrophe is when it’s written, but it’s
pronounced no different as if it was a singular cat with multiple blankets.
You don’t
say, the cats’s blankets, “the cats-iz blankets.” That just sounds stupid. That’s
just the way it is.
The confusion
comes, I believe, with proper nouns – names – that end with an “s”. For example,
“Thomas.” If Thomas has a couple muffins, you would write Thomas’s muffins and pronounce
it as “Thomas-iz muffins.”
Guys’s,
pronounced guy-ziz, just sounds stupid.
To be
honest, I don’t hear it a fraction as often as I hear “Does that make sense?” –
but I hear it enough for it to register in the old ear/brain/mind. I watch
about two dozen YouTube videos a day (hey, it makes the spreadsheets reconcile
to the billing faster), and I probably catch a “guys’s” every other day.
Now, this
may just be a momentary anomaly. Or it could be one of hundreds of examples of the
English language being dumbed down. Maybe it’s a typical eddy in the stream of
linguistic evolution. Not sure. Though I am no scholar of the English language,
I do recognize that slang contributed to the growth of the mother tongue. Think
of how “dude” and “hippie” came into existence, grew to acceptance, then faded
after overuse. More recently, think of all the goofy words the Internet has
given us: blog, phishing, Google, Goop, dox, and such. And maybe it’s now hip
to be dumb – or at least hide one’s intelligence. I read somewhere that we are
entering the post-literate age, and I fear that may be true.
Or maybe I’m
just beginning to outlive my time. My youngest daughter at 17 speaks a lingo
with her friends completely alien to me. I dunno.
What do
you guys’s’s’s think?
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