“Guys”; “I’m Good”; “Doin’”. Mass media are having a very harmful impact upon language. Let’s take three examples. In Hollywood, “guys” is the plural of “you”: “Hey, guys [to a roomful of people of both genders], you want to order a pizza?” “Oh, you guys didn’t have to do this!”, gushes one girl to a group of girls. You see, Hollywood detests grammatical gender differences, all the while it focuses on sex between the genders! Curious, no?
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“Guys” as a plural that includes “gals” is one of myriad attacks upon gender difference committed by the Far Left against society, under the influence of Radical Feminist (lesbian) and Communist dogma. Radical Feminism is designed to confuse people about gender as to make the otherwise impermissible deviation of lesbians acceptable. Communism devalues difference. Of what importance is gender difference among individuals if the individual isn’t important?
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Radical Feminists are adamant that feminine is bad, so all linguistic references to anything female must be exterminated. The -ess” ending to indicate feminine must therefore be eradicated. “Authoress” and “poetess”, once terms of honor to be proud of, are now forbidden for being ‘demeaning’, in identifying the writer as female, which is, we are to believe, a terrible thing to be.
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Women used to like being women, and if anything wanted more words that showed that a given achiever was female. By far most real women (not Hollywood inventions) still enjoy being women, but they have let radfem lesbians dominate discussions of language. It's time to counterattack.
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There really is nothing wrong with being female, and women must show their pride in their gender by demanding the restoration of long-accepted, female-assertive words like “actress”.
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Moreover, they should see that addressing girls or women as “guys” is an INSULT, denounce such usage, and force it to end.
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Another area of linguistic change that needs to be reversed is the apparent attempt by mass media to destroy the word “well” and substitute “good”. An empty-headed celebrity comes onto a talk show. The host(ess) asks “How are you?” and s/he replies, “I’m good.” No, in all likelihood s/he is nothing like good but is a self-centered, useless, amoral piece of Hollywood trash deeply involved in drugs and using people sexually. He or she might, however, be “well”.
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Even worse, the response to “How are you?” is often “I’m doin’ good.” No, it is almost certain that s/he is not “doing good”, that is, performing service to one's fellow man. Many of these worthless celebrities haven’t done any good for anyone in their entire life, and certainly not voluntarily since they became famous. Some are forced to perform community service as punishment for driving drunk, shoplifting, violating the drug laws, etc. That doesn’t count.
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As for “doin’” and other substitutions of -in for -ing, that is not casual but stupid. There are four nasal sounds in today’s English: M, N, NG and, rarely (mostly in words of French origin that some people think are still French, like “ambiance” or "salon" in the sense of a literary gathering), nasalization of the prior vowel, which we can represent as NN). It makes no more sense to substitute an N for the NG-sound in “doing” than it would to substitute an M (I’m doim fime) or NN nasalization.
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Someone who says doin’ isn’t really just dropping a G, because there’s no G-sound in the -ing ending. NG is just a spelling convention for a single, indivisible nasal sound rendered NG in writing. Rather, doin’ replaces one nasal sound with an entirely different nasal sound, which is just idiotic.
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Language is code. You change too many symbols in the code and you render the message incomprehensible. That’s how separate languages evolve out of one. In the case of Latin, people in Hispania (Spain) changed some of the sounds and grammatical forms in one way, while people in Gallia (Gaul, now France) changed them in a different way, while people in Italia changed them in yet another way. Over time, the various forms of Late Latin changed so much that they became mutually incomprehensible. We don’t want that to happen with English.
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Careful use of language shows respect for your audience. You really care that they don’t have to struggle to understand you, and that you don’t confuse them by calling girls or women “guys” or arbitrarily changing individual speech sounds in words. Speech goes quickly, and any momentary confusion causes part of the message to be lost. If the mind is trying to figure out what was just said, it can’t focus on what’s being said now.
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That’s bad enuf. But when people insult other people by depriving them of their rightful gender, that is intolerable. “Guys” is gender-specific, to boys and men. If you wouldn’t say to a roomful of men, “Hey, gals, you want to order a pizza?”, don’t call girls and women “guys”.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:23 PM