Ladies and Gentlemen

2019 ◽  
pp. 115-124
Author(s):  
Allan Metcalf
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Male Infant ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mixed Group ◽  
Second Person ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
Plural Pronoun ◽  
Home Town ◽  
The World

In the 20th century, “guys” continued its expansion, becoming less particular as it grew more general. This chapter illustrates this development with many examples. At first there are a few outliers with an extended meaning, then more, until the extended is included without calling attention to it. “Guy” and “guys” first extended their meaning to encompass every male, infant to geezer. In the process they discarded their negative restrictions to low class or badly dressed, so “guy” was now, often enough, just a neutral designation for a male. And “guys” stretched even further, to include women. At first, as in Edna Ferber’s 1911 novel Dawn O’Hara, The Girl Who Laughed, it’s a mixed group, in this case one woman in an audience of five journalists being addressed by another one, a male. But if “guys” can include one woman, why not all? That’s the case in Rachel Crothers’s 1911 play, “He and She,” that has “guys” entirely female, in the phrase “wise guys.” By mid-century, in most of the United States, “guys” was the normal scarcely noted second-person plural pronoun. It has spread around the world also. Even speakers in Guy Fawkes’s home town of York, England, now use “you guys,” where it was unheard as recently as two decades ago.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Allan Metcalf
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second Person ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
Plural Pronoun ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
Gender Neutral ◽  
The Way

English terrorist Guy Fawkes is the source of our present-day words “guy” and its plural “guys.” After almost succeeding in lighting 36 barrels of gunpowder under the House of Lords on November 5, 1605, Fawkes was put to death within two short months. But his name lived on, thanks to the act of Parliament declaring every November 5 henceforth as a day of thanksgiving to God for delivering them from Gunpowder Treason. From the start, November 5 was a popular holiday, concluding with bonfires where effigies of Guy, soon called “guys,” were burned. Thus the way opened for “guy” to refer by extension to the lowest sort of man, then in due course to a man of odd or ridiculous dress and appearance, then gradually, at least in the United States, to any man of any class or bearing, even fully respectable. And then, even more strangely, the masculine “guy” became gender-neutral “guys.” And so it became the present-day standard second-person plural pronoun, taking the place of plural “you,” which had taken the place of singular “thou,” which had disappeared from everyday use in the 1700s. It was not until the later 20th century that “you guys” was inclusive enough to be the standard second-person plural, but that space had remained unfilled, and “guys” or “you guys” fit in so well that nowadays we hardly even notice.

The Life of Guy

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allan Metcalf
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Blow Up ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Just In Time ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Second Person ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
Plural Pronoun ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
Gender Neutral

This book is about the name “Guy” and its slow, mostly unnoticed development over four centuries since it began on November 5, 1605, with the suddenly famous Guy Fawkes, who was arrested just in time just before he could light the fuse on 36 barrels of gunpowder to blow up the House of Lords. During those four centuries, “Guy” became “guy,” the name for an effigy of Guy Fawkes burned at bonfires every November 5 since. The effigy was called a “guy,” so that more than one effigy would be “guys,” Then, slowly, “guy” extended its signification into a name for a ragged, lower-class male, then any strangely dressed male, then a neutral everyday word for just any male, a “guy.” To top it off, the 20th century extended the plural “guys” or “you guys” to include all human beings, even women speaking to groups of women. None of these developments were made deliberately; the word just quietly slipped by, except for opposition from some Southerners and feminists who objected to it on the grounds that it wasn’t “y’all” and it wasn’t gender neutral. It has become all the more entrenched because now it’s the standard second-person plural pronoun for most of us who speak English.

scholarly journals European Direct Investment in Brazil, 1860 to the Present

2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sérgio de Oliveira Birchal ◽  
Âmara Fuccio de Fraga e Silva
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Direct Investment ◽  
World Economy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Geographical Proximity ◽  
Japanese Firms ◽  
The World ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Western European

European direct investment in Brazil dates back to the discovery of the country and has been since then either hegemonic or more important than a superficial observation can grasp, as this work aims at showing. During the 20th century, the United States has replaced Britain as the worlds economic superpower and the largest direct investor. US dominance in the world economy and geographical proximity to Brazil would suggest that US investments were by far the largest in the country during that century. Furthermore, as Japan had become the second largest economy in the world in the 1980s, we would expect that this would be reflected in the data of the largest multinationals in Brazil. However, as our investigation suggests, Western European direct investment has been as large (and in many occasions even larger) as that of the USA and Japanese firms have never had a prominent presence among the largest firms in Brazil, at least until the late 1990s.

The Unraveling

2021 ◽  
pp. 69-90
Author(s):  
David Bosco
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Arctic ◽  
World War ◽  
Labor Regulations ◽  
Naval Power ◽  
The World

The world wars of the 20th century saw the collapse of pre-war rules designed to protect merchant shipping from interference. In both wars, combatants engaged in unrestricted submarine warfare and imposed vast ocean exclusion zones, leading to unprecedented interference with ocean commerce. After World War I, the United States began to supplant Britain as the leading naval power, and it feuded with Britain over maritime rights. Other developments in the interwar period included significant state-sponsored ocean research, including activity by Germany in the Atlantic and the Soviets in the Arctic. Maritime commerce was buffeted by the shocks of the world wars. Eager to trim costs, US shipping companies experimented with “flags of convenience” to avoid new national safety and labor regulations. The question of the breadth of the territorial sea remained unresolved, as governments bickered about the appropriate outer limit of sovereign control.

scholarly journals The truths and falsehoods of post-truth leaders

Leadership ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (6) ◽  
pp. 757-764
Author(s):  
Sverre Spoelstra
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South America ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
Charismatic Leadership ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
The World

Over the last three years, the idea of a ‘post-truth society’ has become a common talking point. Politicians from around the world, from Europe to South America to the United States, have been labelled as ‘post-truth leaders’, with Donald Trump being portrayed as the standard bearer for this new kind of political discourse. This article suggests that post-truth leadership is nothing new. Ever since Max Weber developed his notion of charismatic leadership in the early 20th century, Western societies have been infatuated with the idea that leaders ought not concern themselves too much with factual reality. In a sense, leadership has been post-truth all along.

The Multinational Corporation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula De la Cruz-Fernandez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Multinational Corporations ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Multinational Corporation ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multinational Businesses

A multinational corporation is a multiple unit business enterprise, vertically managed, that operates in various countries, called host economies. Operations beyond national borders are controlled and managed from one location or headquarters, called the home economy. The units or business activities such as manufacturing, distribution, and marketing are, in the modern multinational as opposed to other forms of international business, all structured under a single organization. The location of the headquarters of the multinational corporation, where the business is registered, defines the “nationality” of the company. While United Kingdom held ownership of over half of the world’s foreign direct investment (FDI), defined not as acquisition but as a managed, controlled investment that an organization does beyond its national border, at the beginning of the 20th century, the United States grew to first place throughout the 20th century—in 2002, 22 percent of the world’s FDI came from the United States, which was also home to ten of the fifty largest corporations in the world. The US-based, large, modern corporation, operated by salaried managers with branches and operations in many nations, emerged in the mid-19th century and has since been a key player and driver in both economic and cultural globalization. The development of corporate capitalism in the United States is closely related with the growth of US-driven business abroad and has unique features that place the US multinational model apart from other business organizations operating internationally such as family multinational businesses which are more common in Europe and Latin America. The range and diversity of US-headquartered multinationals changed over time as well, and different countries and cultures made the nature of managing business overseas more complex. Asia came strong into the picture in the last third of the 20th century as regulations and deindustrialization grew in Europe. Global expansion also meant that societies around the world were connecting transnationally through new channels. Consumers and producers globally are also part of the history of multinational corporations—cultural values, socially constructed perceptions of gender and race, different understandings of work, and the everyday lives and experiences of peoples worldwide are integral to the operations and forms of multinationals.

The fall of demonstrative them

2011 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirk Hazen ◽  
Sarah Hamilton ◽  
Sarah Vacovsky
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Current Distribution ◽  
Quantitative Assessment ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Appalachian Region ◽  
The World

The varieties of English in the United States’ Appalachian region have undergone changes throughout the 20th century. This paper examines a change to one of the more stereotyped of vernacular dialect features, the use of them in a demonstrative determiner construction: them apples are the best. Although this dialect feature is found in English varieties around the world, this study is the first to take up a quantitative assessment of it as a sociolinguistic variable. In this paper, we discuss the historical background for demonstrative them, its current distribution in a corpus of modern Appalachian speech, and its relations to the other modern plural demonstratives, these and those. The data reveal that them functions primarily as an alternate to those, but the use of demonstrative them is sharply in decline across apparent time. As a stereotype of Appalachian speech, demonstrative them still remains, but younger Appalachian speakers have largely abandoned this stigmatized form.

Global India in 21st-Century Asian American Literature

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Literature ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Call Center ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
The World

Twenty-first-century Asian American literature is a developing archive of literary fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and multimodal cultural texts. As a field, it is marked by its simultaneous investments in exploring the United States’ imperial geopolitical relations and the concurrent rise of Asia. Global India, a shorthand for the nation’s ascendance onto the world stage after the liberalizing market reforms of the early 1990s, is discernible in Asian American—and particularly South Asian American—depictions of a range of figures including call center agents, entrepreneurial farmers, art gallery owners, and globe-trotting filmmakers. It is an India to which many writers imagine returning, given its heightened standing in the world economy and the prospect of American decline. This change marks a shift in the literature from the Americas being the primary locus of attachment to Asia as a site of possible reinvestment, both psychic and material. Asian American writers frequently focus on parallels between the experience of international migration and that of in-country migration to India’s major cities. They also tacitly register the rise of India in narratives about the abortive promises of the American dream. In comparison to Asian American literatures of the 20th century, which were primarily read as part of the multiethnic canon of American literature, Asian American literatures written under the sign of Global India are equally legible as part of diasporic, postcolonial, world, and global Anglophone literary formations. Many writers considered postcolonial in the 20th century may be profitably read in the 21st century as Asian American as well, whether because of a move to the United States or a professed affiliation. This expansion of the field is a consequence of the evolving diasporic and global imaginaries of Asian American writers and scholars.

Venezuela

2020 ◽  
pp. 69-87
Author(s):  
Aymara Gerdel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
National Security ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Special Interest ◽  
The United States ◽  
Strategic Partnership ◽  
The Third ◽  
The World ◽  
Trade Partner

The United States and China currently constitute the world's two biggest hegemonic and emerging economic powers. Venezuela maintains commercial relations with both powers in the oil trade. Since the latter 20th century, the United States has been its main trade partner, followed by China, who in the 21st century became the second largest buyer of Venezuelan oil in the world. Venezuela is also the third largest supplier of oil for the United States and the seventh for China. In spite of this close, prolonged, and strategic commercial relationship, Venezuela has recently been designated an “Unusual and Extraordinary Threat to US National Security and Foreign Policy.” In contrast, an alliance with China exists, called the Strategic Partnership Integral. President Donald Trump has already expressed special interest in the situation of Venezuela, just within his first 100 days. This is a country that represents, as said before, an Unusual and Extraordinary Threat to National Security according to an Executive Order dated March 9, 2015.

scholarly journals How the internet has influenced political campaigns in the United States in the 20th century

2019 ◽  
pp. 141-152
Author(s):  
Norbert Tomaszewski
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New Media ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
World Wide ◽  
The United States ◽  
Daily Basis ◽  
Political Campaigns ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Presidential Candidates ◽  
The World

Modern political campaigns in the United States need to combine the use of traditional and new media in order to let the candidate win. The emergement of social media allowed the campaign staffs to create a bond with the voter, through sharing and evaluating the content uploaded by the candidate. Nowadays, with the help of the internet, candidate is able to spend less time and money on the campaign, while interacting with a much bigger number of followers. The internet, however, is a rather new invention and only in the 21st century more than 50% of Americans started to use it on a daily basis. The study aims at determining how did the presidential candidates in the United States try to attract the voter with the help of the World Wide Web – what is more, it’s goal is to answer what kind of voter used the internet back in the 20th century and what kind of candidate would have the biggest chance to attract him.

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