I can fathom the current commonality, however, that put Kentucky in the yankee blue rather than Southern red on the linguistic map. YOU GUYS, the term I detest above all others. Understand, please, I did not grow up hearing this term. Maybe it had festered in Louisville by the 1960s, but not in south central Kentucky. We said "y'all." It's an inclusive term that is always gender-friendly. Then, with the introduction of interstates and cable television, it was as if we'd caught a virus that altered our brain wiring and hit a delete button in our vocabulary. By the 1980s, GUY had been brought southward like a parasite hitchhiking in a boatload of imported fruits from some "furrin" country. We were infected, and you heard it everywhere, just like on TV sit-coms with fake California accents. We thoughtlessly, mindlessly, accepted the use of a word that not only was unnecessary in most context, but was insulting. People began calling one another anarchists!
The grammar is upsetting enough. You hear it daily if you listen and pay attention. "You guys, did you see this?" "I want you guys to ask questions at the end of the presentation." There is just no reason to designate a pronoun modifier acting needlessly as a demonstrative adjective for the hateful noun "guy." "You" is generally sufficient in most cases, yet we insist upon homogenizing our speech patterns and copying this grammatically flawed usage. "You" is such a fluidly functional word. The context defines singularity or plurality without extra effort, and without calling names. "Did you see this" or "I want you to ask questions" encompasses a group audience without question in such a setting, but then we insult our listeners? Yes, it's an insult. The word is derived from Guy Fawkes, the notorious English Catholic who attempted to blow up the British House of Lords in 1605. The greatest historical name perhaps in anarchy, Fawkes' plot and ultimate execution were honored with "Guy Fawkes Day" or "Night" when effigies of Guy are hung & burned in remembrance, and in warning. His given name became associated with the hanging dummies, but crossing the Atlantic the word of shame became just another word for a male.
Perhaps Southerners were more aware of their British vocabulary and its origins. "Guy" in its adulterated form seems to stem from New York and other northern urban centers where concentrations of central and eastern European immigrants adopted the word and adapted its meaning, spreading the corrupted usage westward to the Midwest and on to the California coast. That equates to a common acceptance by the media, from newsprint to television, which ultimately brought the infection into the homes of the South.
More was at work, though, to make successful the homogenization of speech in Dixie, be it upper, deep, or middle. Radio had done its part for decades already. By the 1970s television, controlled, edited, and acted almost entirely outside the South, was everywhere in America. It was our generation's smart phone, and we were quickly hooked, listening to dialect and accent foreign to us, but bombarding our children to such an extent we began to assume it was correct, and that we were backwoods ignorant.
But it took more than television and radio to make us ashamed of how we talked. By now our populations, even in the smallest of towns, have shifted and changed, with but few remaining who have familial ties to the same location 150 years prior. Worse than carpetbaggers, northerners and Midwesterners have relocated south in droves, seeking cheap living and better weather, their own roots cut off by an economic hatchet. They have altered the composition of our communities, having no ties to our past, no desire to preserve what was never theirs. And we, weakly, allow our children to emulate their speech patterns, finding shame in our own, another legacy of our ancestors we see no value in.
Gentle, even sweet, slow & melodic cadence of give & take in talk handed down from our grandparents is replaced with fast, nasally droning like wasps, and as irritating. Old words are gone, new vulgar ones accepted without question. We falsely "improve" ourselves toward another's model, not our own, acting out of self-imposed shame for no legitimate reasons, just that the incomer finds us less intelligent and backward. We follow the fool, and become the fool. No wonder we now collectively see no reason to preserve the past. It is dead, demise brought by our own hands. We no longer speak the past, we no longer hear it. If all that is left is a decaying statue, well, why keep it? We long before stopped telling the stories, so the tales are forgotten, and with them the song of the words themselves. For spoken word is as much a part of memory as are the tales of a culture. Both are vital to make us unique. Without them, we are Xeroxed, cookie-cuttered shadows. You guys get that?
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