This book is dedicated to you guys, who have turned the terrible name of England’s greatest villain into a benign way of addressing family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, and the public in general.
It’s a unique chapter in language history. “You guys” or simply “guys” is the only instance in the English language where the name of a person—and an evil terrorist at that—is now used by most of us as our second-person plural pronoun.
To get an idea of how strange this is, suppose we used a different name as our pronoun. Suppose it’s Sean Connery, and we decide to make Sean our second-person plural pronoun. Everybody then would be addressed as Sean, as in:
Hurry up, you seans, look what’s happening.
My dear seans, whether you are 10 or 80, this applies to you.
Your seans’s mood needs a little improvement. Have a beer!
Maybe a closer analogy would be to use the name of a modern villain like Osama bin Laden. We would then be saying things like:
Oh you osamas, how sweet of you to send me flowers from the whole group.
Quiet, osamas! Listen to me. We can’t win unless you give me your full attention. Hey, you osamas, did you hear what I said?
But we don’t use those names. Instead, we use the name of a terrorist so terrible that England still celebrates his defeat with bonfires and fireworks more than four centuries later.
How that came about is the story of this book. The story of Guy Fawkes’s prominent front-line role in the Gunpowder Plot of November 5, 1605, is well known. So are reports of the Gunpowder Treason holidays decreed by Parliament for every November 5 thereafter. Language scholars know all about second-person plural pronouns. But no one seems to have noticed how remarkable it is that a hated name has unobtrusively turned into a benign word most of us use nowadays. Perhaps it helped that for centuries “guy” was such a slang word that nobody noticed its encroachment.
This book, then, puts it all together, showing how a hated name became the normal way to speak to any group of two or more in the 21st century.