guy

   The most frequent use of this vocative is in the plural, ‘guys’ or ‘you guys’ being addressed to a group of men or women, or to a mixture of both sexes. Such usage is rapidly spreading to Britain in the late 1980s, though it was formerly an Americanism. When it is used in the singular, ‘guy’ still seems to apply only to men, and to be used by American speakers. Examples of such usage occur in North Dallas Forty, where a professional football player says to a team-mate: ‘Hey, guy, did you see what that Braniff stock did today?’ The same speaker addresses various other colleagues in the same way. The Magic Army, by Leslie Thomas, has an American soldier say to another: ‘Okay, guy, time’s up.’ Both novels have examples of ‘you guys’ addressed to groups of men. ‘Guy’, in its meaning of ‘man’, is sometimes said to derive from the personal name ‘Guy’. It is more likely to be a variant form of Hebrew ‘goy’, which describes a gentile.