The English language is a remarkable and unwieldy beast. It lacks the musicality of French or Italian and the precision of German. It doesn’t, as The New York Times explored in a column published yesterday, even possess a natural word for the second person plural. Spanish has ustedes and vosotros, French has vous, Italian has voi, Mandarin has nimen, and English has . . . well, therein lies the problem. As linguist John McWhorter noted in the column, for want of such a word, English speakers have spent much of the past several decades transforming “you guys” into a gender-neutral term to fill the void. It’s an interesting linguistic analysis—and one that is entirely unnecessary in Texas, or throughout the South. We’ve long had a word that serves…
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