Villain Becomes Hero

Another diversion is necessary to acknowledge the return of Guy Fawkes in the present day. No, it’s not his Second Coming, but there is awareness of Guy Fawkes as a role model for modern-day activists and protesters. It has come particularly from Alan Moore and David Lloyd, creators of the graphic novel “V for Vendetta,” a serial first published as a book in 1988. It imagines a ruthless Fascist regime in England in the 1990s, opposed by a lone rebel who calls himself simply V, and who always wears a mask that is a simplified adaptation of the sketches of Guy Fawkes back in the 1600s, but with a smile. The resemblance to Fawkes is emphasized at the very beginning, where unlike Fawkes he casually blows up the houses of Parliament after reciting “Remember, remember, the fifth of December” to a young woman he has just rescued from the police. The story became a movie with Hugo Weaving as V and Natalie Portman as the rescued girl Evey. The masks were used by Occupy protesters and others early in the 21st century. Rather than an arch-villain, V and the mask now signal opposition to government tyranny. This chapter briefly cites Guy Fawkes’s 19th-century adaptations and references, including the beginning of Thomas Hardy’s 1888 novel, Return of the Native.

Roadblocks

For the most part, the gradual expansion of the meaning of “guy” to include everyone, male and female and GLBTQ, has slipped by without particular notice by the general public, and even by linguists. There’s no mystery about Guy Fawkes being the starting point that leads as far from that beginning as groups of women calling each other “you guys,” but neither is there much interest—except in two quarters that object: the feminist movement and the Old South of the United States. Feminists who want the inherently sexist English language to become gender neutral object to the expansion of “guys” to include women as well as men. As a result, some people try to avoid “guys,” though the alternatives aren’t that obvious, at best a plain “you all.” The other objection comes from Southerners, who don’t so much object to “guys” as keep to their well-established older alternative “y’all.” The boundary between “guys” or “you guys” and “y’all” has remained firm for the last century, perhaps getting its strength as one last means of holding the line against the northern states.

The Original Guy

“Guy,” a French name brought across the Channel by Normans in 1066, had become a familiar English name long before Guy Fawkes was born in 1570. The name was memorable enough that while supervising delivery of gunpowder to the disused cellar under the House of Lords, Guy Fawkes adopted a bland, inconspicuous pseudonym: John Johnson. If he had maintained that pseudonym until his death a few months later, this book wouldn’t exist. “You johns” couldn’t succeed like “you guys.” Fawkes was born to a Protestant father and a Catholic mother. The father died when Guy was 8, so the rest of his upbringing was presumably Catholic. Catholic plots to overthrow Elizabeth’s government (and then James’s government after her death in 1603) continued in frequency and intensity, though never successful. Fawkes meanwhile embarked on a military career, fighting with distinction for many years in the English Regiment of the Catholic Spanish Brigade in the Netherlands. For his expertise in undermining and gunpowder, Robert Catesby recruited him for the most horrendous Catholic plot ever, to blow up the House of Lords with Lords, Commons, government officials, and royalty assembled for the opening day of Parliament. At the last minute a search party caught Fawkes red-handed, turning him over to anti-Catholic King James VI for interrogation, and he soon admitted his real name. Modern experiments confirm that 36 barrels of gunpowder would indeed have destroyed the House of Lords and everyone in it.

Ladies and Gentlemen

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.

My Pronoun, ’tis of Thee

Chapter 8 interrupts the narrative to explain the importance of the further development of “Guy” to “guy” or “guys.” It tells about the second-person personal pronouns of English from Old English times, a thousand years ago, to the present. These are words we regularly use in speech and writing: first-person singular “I” and plural “we,” third person “he, she, it” and “they,” and then the second person, which happens to have undergone major changes in the past few centuries. Originally the second-person singular was “thou,” the plural “you.” But then, like several other European languages, the second-person plural was seen as more polite than “thou,” so “you” became second-person singular too. That was fine, except now a listener couldn’t tell whether a speaker was referring just to the listener or to the whole group. So with “you” solidly entrenched as second-person singular, a substitute had to be found for second-person plural. One possibility was “y’all,” still preferred in the American South, but that can be used for the singular too. Eventually, while the vacancy remained empty two centuries later, a successful substitution emerged, none other than the “guys” most of use as second-person plural today.

Gunpowder Days in England

In addition to the celebrations of Gunpowder Day every November 5, Guy Fawkes appears in 17th-century literature as an arch-villain. Thomas Decker wrote a play in 1611 that encounters Guy in Hell. In 1614 in his play “Bartholomew Faire”; Ben Jonson’s character Lanthorn boasts of his success as a puppeteer with the topic of the Gunpowder Plot. In 1622 young John Milton wrote a 226-line poem in Latin referring to Gunpowder Treason. By 1641, Francis Herring could make Fawkes a son of the devil. The poem “Remember, Remember” reflects the later development of November 5. As the centuries went on, anti-Catholic sentiment in England finally diminished, making Fawkes even more the focus of what often now was called Guy Fawkes Day.

Reformation

Henry VIII, king of England from 1509 to 1547, ought to be held responsible for the “guy” and “guys” we say nowadays. Guy Fawkes’s terrorist attack in 1605 would not even have been imaginable in the peaceable religious climate of England before 1533. Until then, Henry had been an informed, devout Catholic. But in the 1530s, wanting a male heir that his first wife Catherine couldn’t provide, he asked the pope for an annulment of that marriage so he could marry Anne Boleyn and have a legitimate male heir with her. When the pope wouldn’t oblige, Henry disavowed allegiance to the pope and declared himself supreme head of the church in England. Until then, everyone in England had been Catholic; now officially nobody could. That caused bitter conflicts. After Henry’s death in 1547 the church became strongly Protestant under King Edward VI, then strongly Catholic under Mary, and more moderate, though still staunchly anti-papal, under Elizabeth. For good measure, the English church was under attack on the other flank by the extreme Protestant Puritans. None of the Protestant versions satisfied Catholics, who tried plot after plot to unseat the queen and restore Catholicism. That was the explosive fuel that ignited the Gunpowder Treason Plot of 1605.

The First Public Guy

On November 4, 1605, Guy Fawkes was just another obscure English gentleman with Catholic sympathies and a decade of success as a courageous and skilled soldier. His obscurity abruptly changed in the night of November 5. On November 6, encouraged by “gentler tortures” ordered by the king, “John Johnson” confessed that he was Guy Fawkes. Thus the public quickly learned that Guy Fawkes had come very close to destroying the House of Lords with everyone in it, and the name Guy Fawkes became immediately one of the most famous in England, far more than that of Robert Catesby, because Guy had been the guy with the match. Within two months, all 13 of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators were arrested or killed, including four in a gunfight at Holbeche House in Staffordshire. On January 30 and 31, 1506, having been convicted of treason in a short trial, he and the seven others who remained alive were hanged, drawn, and quartered. That was the end for the earthly Guy.

Future Guys

So “you guys” and plain “guys” have succeeded in filling the vacuum in second-person plural pronouns left by the departure of “thou.” What’s next? Four possible futures come to mind: (1) “guys” could continue to extend its hegemony over other candidates for the role of addressing groups; (2) like the plural, the singular “guy” could extend refer not just to a male but to any human being; (3) “guys” could be excoriated sufficiently by those who object to its wider use, so it would retreat to meaning males only; and (4) student activists could follow the example of “guy” and “guys” and use their own names as second-person plural pronouns that everyone should use.

Guys Victorious

“You guys” or plain “guys” has now become the standard second-person plural personal pronoun used by most of us. We know that because we don’t have to stop and think about it; we just use it as the normal way to designate a group of people. In linguistic terms, it’s now unmarked, as it has been from the start; if it were marked, that is noticed, every time it’s used, that would be a sign that it’s not the regular plural. But it is. What about the competition? It has the advantage over “yous,” “you-uns,” and “yinz” by being less conspicuous and thus less likely to encounter objections for any reason. “You folks” and “you people” are impeccable, but they carry implications; the former is too folksy for some occasions, “you people” a little condescending for others. Without being obvious, “you guys” has a hint of friendship or camaraderie. “You guys” also has the advantage over “y’all,” in being clearly only plural, where “y’all” can be singular too. And “y’all” is strongly linked to the South, whereas “you guys” is tied to no particular region.