you two

   An expression used to address two people which can vary from friendly to unfriendly depending on the way it is said. Examples of usage occur in Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry (fairly friendly), Stop at Nothing, by John Welcome (both friendly and unfriendly examples), The Old Boys, by William Trevor (friendly), Memento Mori, by Muriel Spark (friendly), The Masters, by C.P. Snow (friendly), Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis (friendly), Lord of the Flies, by William Golding (friendly), A Kind of Loving, by Stan Barstow (fairly neutral), The Half Hunter, by John Sherwood (unfriendly), An Error of Judgement, by Pamela Hansford Johnson (friendly), The Country Girls, by Edna O’Brien (friendly), The Bell, by Iris Murdoch (friendly).

   Other numbers could replace ‘two’, of course: A Woman Called Fancy, by Frank Yerby, has: ‘“All right, you three,” Sheriff Bowen growled; “get moving.”’ There would be a strong tendency for a speaker to switch to an expression like ‘all of you’ if he were addressing more than three people. The Magic Army, by Leslie Thomas, has an angry speaker who expands ‘you two’ to the unusual ‘you bloody two’.

   On rare occasions ‘you two’ is addressed to a single person, the second person being known to both speaker and listener but not actually present. ‘You hitting it off, you two?’ occurs in Absolute Beginners, by Colin MacInnes, and refers to the partner of the person addressed who is not there at the time.