What are guys?

From The Oldie

Turn up at Chez Bruce, voted by Observer readers as the best restaurant the country, second-best by Harden’s restaurant guide, and the maitre d’ will more than likely greet you with, “Hi guys, how are you doing this evening?” In just about any restaurant you care to mention, the waiter breezes up to your table and says with rising southern hemisphere enunciation, “Can I get you guys some water?” (being a waiter, he probably can) and later barges in to your conversation to ask, “Is everything all right for you tonight, guys?”

The word “guys” – always in the plural – is the latest example of the Americanisation of our language permeating modern civic life: Arrive at the check-in, “Hi guys, how are you this morning?”; stroll into a fashionable kitchen shop, “Can I help you guys with anything?”; listen to the nation’s children being told to “Dig in guys,” on the sports field.

In fact, teachers use the word habitually and non-discriminately. Their charges are never referred to as pupils or, God forbid, children. Teacher will now exclaim: “Will you guys be quiet, please!” as if that somehow puts them on a level with the “kids”.

So what are guys? They are certainly not the gang of burly men the word used to connote. Can a group of women be “guys”? Is there an age limit? Does the Maitre d’ at Chez Bruce eye his customers up and down and, upon the sight of walking stick and a decent coat, amend his welcome?

He does not. Increasingly this horrid catch-all appellation is replacing the trusted honorifics of Mr and Mrs, sir and madam.

Guys are what used to be gentlemen, women, children. Now they have involuntarily become part of a club that spans the Anglophone world. Those who use the word guys do so in the belief that it makes them at ease in Sydney, Cape Town or LA. It is meant to imply a classless mateyness that says they are part of a modern, tolerant, thrusting, unisex global village.

It is not, though, an expression of being working class. Tony Blair used the word not in the way that he used the glottal stop to ingratiate himself with his working class constituents, but as the informally formal parlance of the new professional class – the wonks, say, who inhabit his department of spin as well as the Washington offices of his grown-up friend George W, who of course is just a regular guy.

But it is, of course, ultimately selfish. And bogus. Whereas manners are meant to make the beneficiary of those manners feel at ease, the use of the word guys is for their benefit, not yours. By saying “Hi guys” they are telling you that they are cool internationalists. Even worse, guys is a word that forms part of the vernacular of a generation convinced that it is more enlightened than it really is.