Guy Fawkes enjoyed—or suffered from—a mere two months of fame before his life came to an abrupt and agonizing end. We know for certain that he died on January 21, 1606, when after a brief trial he was convicted of treason and publicly hanged, drawn, quartered, and beheaded.
But though he was dead, his legacy lives on in our language, until today it is stronger than ever. We call each other by his name.
Until the end of his life, Guy Fawkes was little known beyond his circle of family, friends, and colleagues. Coming from a good Catholic family in Yorkshire, England, he impressed others by his good looks and bearing, his manners, his courage, his devotion to duty, and not least his devotion to the Catholic faith. A tall, imposing gentleman, at age 35 he had earned a reputation for valor as a soldier fighting for the Catholic cause in the Low Countries, and known in particular for his expertise in placing gunpowder in tunnels to undermine and blow up enemy fortifications.
Back in England, on November 5, 1605, he had matches and fuses ready to apply to 36 barrels of gunpowder he had placed under the House of Lords in Westminster Palace, ready to blow it up with Lords, Commons, royalty, including King James I, and clergy present for the opening of Parliament.
He tried, and almost succeeded, to kill most of the government of England on that day. At the last moment, in the nick of time, he was discovered and prevented from lighting the gunpowder. Ever since, he has been viewed as the nation’s arch villain, portrayed as a companion of the Devil himself.
But in his legacy, over the past four centuries things have changed. His name now lives more than ever, but with a change of heart. Though Guy Fawkes is unquestionably dead, his name is unquestionably alive in our language, nowadays more than ever before.
So guys, whoever and wherever you are, you are heirs of Guy Fawkes.
And “guys” means everyone, or nearly everyone, where English is spoken, especially in the United States outside the Old South.
It doesn’t matter who you are—male or female; baby or child or teen or grown-up or past your prime; any race or place; athletic or lethargic; winner or loser—as long as you’re a human being, you’re one of the guys.
It is a remarkable fact, and yet not often remarked, that throughout most of the United States, indeed much of the English-speaking world, when we gather in groups we address the others as “guys” or “you guys.” It’s so normal nowadays that we scarcely notice how peculiar it really is: a singular “guy” referring to males only, alongside a plural “guys” including the entire human race.
So if a guy is speaking to a group of guys, we know that the speaker is male, but the audience can be male, female, or mixed, or for that matter GLBTQ: any person at all. If a female is the speaker, she’s not a guy, but her audience of guys is still any person at all. And when that female speaker becomes a member of that same group but now is listening to someone else, she’s one of the guys again.
In fact, “you guys” also now occupies territory at the heart of the English language, namely, the second-person plural pronoun. Though there are alternatives, most notably “y’all,” those alternatives have retreated during the 21st century so far. Well, with an important exception we’ll encounter later.
And never before in the history of the English language has any of the personal pronouns used a person’s name.
But really, where did these guys come from? Yes, they came from Guy Fawkes, by strange twists and turns nobody could have imagined in 1605.
It will take a book to explain the unlikely circumstances that led to today’s prevalence of guy and guys. So guys, pay attention. We can begin by pointing out a few highlights of the transformation from terrorist to innocuous informal greeting.
In America, ever since we declared independence and made a point of leaving the mother country’s celebrations behind, we have pretty much forgotten the original Guy. That’s important to the development of new meanings. England, however, still has memories of that particular Guy more than 400 years ago. In some places in England and the rest of the United Kingdom, they still burn a straw version of this Guy every November 5 on what is called Bonfire Night, Fireworks Night, or, more ominously, Gunpowder Treason Night.
Or, most ominously of all—and here’s where you guys come in—Guy Fawkes Night. In January 1606, a grateful Parliament enacted the Observance of Fifth November Act, also called the Thanksgiving Act. November 5 hereafter would be a day of thanksgiving to God. It was to be a holiday, with church services in the day and bonfires and fireworks in the night, praising God for providential deliverance from gunpowder treason. With the day off, bonfires, and fireworks, November 5 immediately became one of England’s top holidays.
Nowadays even in England, after more than four centuries, people often have to be reminded of the original Guy and what he stands for. But every November 5, shortly after we in the United States and many now in the UK have celebrated Halloween with costumes and trick-or-treating, some English towns and people still celebrate the narrow escape in 1605 of nearly the entire English government from the deadliest of bonfires and fireworks.
Historians have studied the English Reformation, the life of Guy Fawkes, and the Gunpowder Plot in great detail. Linguists have delved into the transformation of Guy into a name and then a pronoun. Language purists and language reformers have argued about the seeming sexism of a word that stands for everyone yet remains, in the singular, decidedly male. This book shows how they happen to tie together and aims to untangle the knot.
First things first, though. This book is not a biography of Guy Fawkes.
No, it’s the story of a miracle, a transformation more miraculous than that of a caterpillar into a butterfly. The miracle indeed began with Guy Fawkes, but it has taken four centuries to accomplish, and neither he nor any of the other humans unwittingly involved in the transformation had any idea of the result now available to us in the 21st century.
And to occur at all, the transformation required many accidents of history involving characters and events as notable, and as remote from Guy Fawkes, as George Washington and the American Revolution.
The ample cast of characters involved in this transformation not only did not intend it but couldn’t possibly imagine it. It was unimaginable because nothing like it had happened before, and it is highly unlikely that anything just like it will ever happen again. It deserves attention therefore not because it is a commonplace of human history and language but because it shows just how far out of the ordinary they can go. Truth is stranger than fiction.
True, it began with Guy Fawkes. If it hadn’t been for his character, his participation in the plot to blow up the House of Parliament with legislators and royalty inside, and his near success in accomplishing that shocking act of total destruction, the miraculous transformation couldn’t have begun. But thanks to his expertise in handling gunpowder, and to the fact that he was first to be caught, even though Fawkes was not the leader of the 13 conspirators, he was the leading figure in the eyes of the English government and public. That was where the miracle began. So his essential role in the transformation will require full attention in the chapters that follow.
At the same time, however, a full biography won’t be necessary. For one thing, Guy has already been blessed, or more often cursed, with detailed biographies, such as Antonia Fraser’s The Gunpowder Plot: Terror and Faith in 1605 (2002), or one by John Paul Davis, Pity for the Guy, published in 2010. Both Fraser and Davis offer even-tempered judgments of both sides, in notable contrast to the generally vitriolic earlier treatments by authors who with their English compatriots saw Fawkes as a diabolical villain. That could easily be imagined by anyone thinking about the mayhem and loss of life Guy intended—and by the reminder, every November 5 since, of “the Guy’s” murderous designs. But until that fateful moment, Fawkes himself was an honorable soldier, often involved in diplomatic missions, highly regarded by monarchs as well as by comrades in arms for his expertise and bearing.
But what is the miracle that calls for description and explanation? It is this: the transformation of a flesh-and-blood person into special kinds of words: the all-encompassing “guys,” the masculine “guy,” and a true linguistic miracle—a new second-person plural pronoun. And one that two centuries ago was nonexistent, one century ago exceedingly rare, but nowadays is both frequent and respectable.
“You guys!”
Granted, not everyone uses this second-person plural pronoun yet. And a few, though increasingly fewer, strongly object to it. But others who in the 20th century would have spoken up against it have now become comfortable with it—and even prefer it to older forms like you all or y’all, the abbreviated version that has served for more than a century as a marker of the “southern accent” in America.
For several centuries after the near-success of the Gunpowder Plot, “you guys” had nothing to do with pronouns. It was only after something also unprecedented happened to the pronouns of English that the use of “you guys” could be possible.
What happened to our language was that the old second-person singular gradually dropped out. Formerly, like German and Spanish and French and Italian, our language had both a singular (thou, thee, thine) and a plural (ye, you, yours) in what is called the second person, the pronouns we use in direct address to others. To this day those other languages keep this singular–plural distinction in the second person, but English does not. That also has an explanation, and it has to do with the character of English society.
Then came the American Revolution, another absolute necessity for the development of “you guys.” Its role was to make Americans gradually forget about Guy Fawkes. For the English, Guy was unquestionably an arch villain. But when Americans were also fighting a British government, the reasons and circumstances were quite different, so Guy was understandable as a heroic revolutionary.
Whatever you think of the concept of Intelligent Design, it doesn’t apply to the development of “guys.” True, there are many words whose origins can be traced to intelligent authors thinking rationally. The authors don’t have to be divine, just humans wanting to frame their ideas more lucidly than the language has hitherto allowed.
But the process by which “guy” metamorphosed from one terrorist to a variety of everyday uses defies logic.
To see how it got from there to here, from then to now, we need to provide a fair amount of context. That means we must begin with the establishment of the Church of England, founded nearly a century earlier than 1605 because King Henry VIII wanted a divorce. The population of England was largely Catholic at that time. Soon the English church broke with papal Rome, and everyone was expected to renounce Roman Catholicism. Some resisted, and that begins the story of Guy and the guys.