As early as the 17th century, the effigy burned at November 5 bonfires came to be known as “the Guy.” That easily became “the guy,” since there was no difference at all in pronunciation—and only in more modern times were capital letters restricted to proper names.
Furthermore, the fact that Fawkes was but one Guy among many, as we have noted in Chapter 3, made the transition easy. The other Guys generally had better reputations. They were well known for feats of daring and courage, above all the legendary homegrown Englishman Guy of Warwick. In the histories and chronicles we also read, for example, of Guy de Beauchamp, tenth Earl of Warwick, and Guy of Lusignan, Crusader king of Jerusalem, who lost that kingdom to Saladin.
And the fact that these Guys were human made it easy to make the transition from arch-villain to effigy and then back again to human being.
The extensive use of their names also led to the appearance of forms of “guy” that prefigure later uses, such as “a guy” in this 1640 collection of poems by Thomas Carew:
we have a guy, a beavis, or some true round-table night as ever fought for lady, to each beauty brought.
In 1659, William Prynne writes of “a guy faux with his dark Lanthorn to blow up a parliament.”
A 1655 poem “Truth’s integrity” has this line, “brave guy earl of warwick, that champion so stout: with his warlike behavior, through the world he did stray to win his phillis favour.”
Thomas Merton’s 1658 play “Love and War: A Tragedy” puts a character on stage with two swords and armor, saying, “my helmet Shews a force to kill a guy, or Hercules.”
From 1676, The Baronage of England by Sir William Dugdale: “this guy being then dead without issue.”
Richard Johnson’s 1696 history of the seven champions of Christendom uses a possessive form: “it was sir guys fortune to met with the Egyptian king.”
That’s how language change often occurs. A word or phrase used in one context becomes convenient to use in another, often without the user being aware of making the change. And that’s because every human has to learn a language from scratch, rather than inheriting it. In the process of listening and then interpreting what others say, we now and then come up with different interpretations.
The examples above look like modern uses of “guy”: “a guy,” “this guy,” “brave guy,” “the same guy.” In larger contexts, they aren’t always modern. Here is Carew’s fuller context for “a guy”:
we bring prince arthur, or the brave st: george himselfe (great Queene) to you, you’ll soone discerne him; and we have a guy, a beavis, or some true round-table knight, as everfought for lady, to each beauty brought.
Surrounded by the noblest of chivalry—Prince Arthur, St. George, and “a beavis” (Sir Bevis of Hampton), the arch-villain Guy Fawkes would be way out of place. Instead, Carew must have meant “a Guy” like Guy of Warwick or Guy of Lusignan. Because there was more than one prominent Guy, “a guy” was possible here. So it was already a familiar phrase, ready to take on the meaning of “an effigy of Guy Fawkes” and then “a male human of the lowest order,” and then (all of this is gradual, taking centuries) “any male,” as it is today.
Even more modern-sounding is The Antiquities of Warwickshire by Sir William Dugdale (1656). Since it tells about quite a few Guys, it has many phrases that would seem perfectly modern today: which guy, this guy, the famous guy (yes, of Warwick), the warlike guy, the renowned guy, the sometime famous guy, our noble guy, the same guy, the valiant guy, the said guy, the said great guy. Many of these phrases, like “the famous guy,” appear again and again in The Antiquities.
Thanks to the custom that developed of youths begging “pennies for the guy” to help finance November 5 bonfires, it was easy enough for the meaning of “guy” to develop a plural “guys,” extending the word beyond the name of the point man for the Gunpowder Plot. At times all of the effigies to be burned were referred to as “guys.”
That, in turn, led to the extended meaning of “guy” as a real flesh-and-blood man, though at first, because of Fawkes’s notoriety, the effigy was a particularly disreputable or garishly garbed one.
As the Oxford English Dictionary notes, this “guy,” in bonfires built for November 5, “is habited in grotesquely ragged and ill-assorted garments.” Its earliest example is from 1806, in a letter from W. Burrell to C. K. Sharpe: “A month ago there was neither shape nor make in me. . . . No guy ever matched me.” And in 1825 W. Hone wrote in his Every-day Book: “Formerly an old cocked hat was the reigning fashion for a ‘Guy.’ ”
Around the start of the 19th century, then, “guys” were still the feature of Gunpowder Treason bonfires. But as the years went on, their connection to the specific character of Guy Fawkes diminished, especially in the United States. That helped the generic “guy” gradually lose its ill repute and begin to be used as a slang term to designate any man, at least in conversation among men who were uncouth or pretentious.
Americans took the lead in this development. They found it difficult to focus on Fawkes as the arch-traitor, considering that they too had aimed to overthrow the British government. It was also hard for Americans to get excited about a man across the ocean, two centuries earlier, who was trying to do more or less what Americans had been doing in the Revolutionary War. Maybe he wasn’t such a villain.
And since in the meantime English had lost its second-person plural pronoun, “you” having to serve both as singular and plural, “guys” or “you guys” became a candidate for the unambiguous plural. But that happened later.
Along with singular “guy” came plural “guys.” That was even further removed from Guy Fawkes, who remained a singular guy, not plural. Since both “guy” and “guys” were informal and lower-class slang, both very likely had been used for decades before the earliest known instances. In any case, around the time of the American Civil War, “guy” and “guys” begin to appear in print.
For example, Theodore Winthrop’s 1862 novel about New York during the Revolutionary War has both singular and plural:
Peter’s seedy coat was freshness and elegance compared to the scarecrow uniforms it now encountered. Our Revolutionary officers were braves at heart, but mostly Guys in costume.
And you, O Peter Skerrett! you have shaved off your moustache and donned a coat much too small—you have made a guy of yourself for your first interview with this angel! Shall the personal impression she may already have made be here revised and corrected?
In 1863, Winthrop’s posthumous collection Life in the Open Air, and Other Papers used “guys” to describe horses in a chapter on “Washington as a Camp” during the Civil War. Winthrop was one of the first casualties of the war.
Here, by the way, let me pause to ask, as a horseman, though a foot-soldier, why generals and other gorgeous fellows make such guys of their horses with trappings. If the horse is a screw, cover him thick with saddlecloths, girths, cruppers, breast-bands, and as much brass and tinsel as your pay will enable you to buy; but if not a screw, let his fair proportions be seen as much as may be, and don’t bother a lover of good horse-flesh to eliminate so much uniform before he can see what is beneath.
Also in 1863, we find incompetent travel writers derided as “guys” in Gail Hamilton’s (Mary Abigail Dodge) Gala-Days. In a dialogue, she tells her brother Halicarnassus:
“I travel to write. I do not write because I have travelled. I am not going to subordinate my book to my adventures. My adventures are going to be arranged beforehand with a view to my book.”
Halicarnassus. “A most original way of getting up a book!”
Hamilton. “Not in the least. It is the most common thing in the world. Look at our dear British cousins.”
Halicarnassus. “And see them make guys of themselves. They visit a magnificent country that is trying the experiment of the world, and write about their shaving-soap and their babies’ nurses.”
Louisa May Alcott has a “guy,” an overdressed girl, in her 1868 “Kitty’s Class Day and Other Stories”:
As she stepped out of the cars at Cambridge, Jack opened his honest blue eyes and indulged in a low whistle of astonishment: for if there was anything he especially hated, it was the trains, chignons and tiny bonnets then in fashion. He was very fond of Kitty, and prided himself on being able to show his friends a girl who was charming, and yet not over-dressed. “She has made a regular guy of herself; I won’t tell her so, and the dear little soul shall have a jolly time in spite of her fuss and feathers. But I do wish she had let her hair alone and worn that pretty hat of hers.”
And we find a “guy” meditating to himself in Anna Dickinson’s “What Answer?” published in 1868:
No, that will never do! Go to her looking like such a guy? Nary time. I’ll get scrubbed, and put on a clean shirt, and make myself decent, before she sees me. She always used to look nice as a new pin, and she liked me to look so too; so I’d better put my best foot foremost when she hasn’t laid eyes on me for such an age. I’m fright enough, anyway, goodness knows, with my thinness, and my old lame leg.
The noted author Frances Anne Kemble wrote “Old Woman’s Gossip, VIII,” for the March 1876 issue of the Atlantic Monthly:
To me, of course, my first fancy ball was an event of unmixed delight, especially as my mother had provided for me a lovely Anne Boleyn costume of white satin, point-lace, and white Roman pearls, which raised my satisfaction to rapture. The two Harrys, however, far from partaking of my ecstasy, protested, pouted, begged off, all but broke into open rebellion at the idea of making what they called “guys” and “chimney-sweeps” ’ of themselves; and though the painful sense of any singularity might have been mitigated by the very numerous company of their fellow-fools assembled in the ball-room, to keep them in countenance, and the very unpretending costume of simple and elegant black velvet in which my mother had attired them, as Hamlet and Laertes (it must have been in their very earliest college days), they hid themselves behind the ball-room door and never showed as much as their noses or their toes.
Bret Harte, in Drift from Two Shores (1878), has a girl observing “guys” wearing “bedrabbled” clothes:
As they plodded wearily toward her, she bit her red lips, smacked them on her cruel little white teeth like a festive and sprightly ghoul, and lisped: —“You do look so like guys! For all the world like those English shopkeepers we met on the Righi, doing the three-guinea excursion in their Sunday clothes!” Certainly the spectacle of these exotically plumed bipeds, whose fine feathers were already bedrabbled by sand and growing limp in the sea breeze, was somewhat dissonant with the rudeness of sea and sky and shore.
Characters in Augustin Daly’s comedy Love in Tandem (1879) likewise use “guys” to mean garish attire:
Dick. In every well-regulated family everything should be in harmony!
Aprilla. Harmony! Music the soul of harmony! and that ridiculous fencing! Two men dressed like guys. Why, you have only to look at the teachers to see the difference.
Dick. Indeed!
Aprilla. Madame Laurette is a lady of the highest social position.
Dick. They all are. I never knew a music teacher that wasn’t.
The century turned, and “guys” referring to men in general began to bloom. It was still slang, but no longer restricted to people of bad fortune or fashion.
Augustus Thomas wrote this line for a character in his 1902 comedy, The Other Girl:
You know they don’t care what they say, these newspaper guys. (Pause) That sort of thing don’t help a girl any.
An article about modern young sailors in the November 1904 Century magazine by R. F. Zogbaum, “Our Modern Blue-Jacket,” has this comment:
Although, with clue-garnets and stu’n’sails, much of the picturesque language of the sea has passed away, Jack’s conversation is still garnished with expressions and terms born of the conditions of his life on the ocean. His language with his mates is a curious combination of Bowery slang and sea-phrases—“Youse guys come in out er that boat and bear a hand!”—as I heard one young cockswain order—and I believe that if Shakspere could have known our modern Yankee man-of-war’s-man, he never would have put strange oaths in the mouth of a soldier.
During the 1900s lower-class slang still predominates, as in these quotes from early 20th-century fiction:
“T ain’t fer long, no how,” less all them guys are ijuts.(1906)
I’m going out to-night to see if there’s any word from the—from the party. These guys ain’t all fools. (1907)
After a while you come to long enough to hand your money to a man behind a little window who thrusts a ticket into your face and tells you to “git out o’ de way an’ give de odder guys a chancet”—a thing which you couldn’t help doing if you wanted to. (1907)
Denver relaxed into a range song by way of repartee: “I want mighty bad to be married, To have a garden and a home; I ce’tainly aim to git married, And have a gyurl for my own.” “Aw! Y’u fresh guys make me tired.” (1908, Wyoming)
“We’ll have the men we want inside of fifteen minutes,” he promised the mob. “We’ll rush them from both sides, and show those guys on the landing whether they can stop us,” added Bostwick. (Same as above)