In standard English, you is both singular and plural. While that may seem unremarkable to you (that’s you sitting in your seat, and all of you collectively), it actually separates English from many other languages that distinguish the singular and plural forms.
It also distinguishes standard English from its many non-standard forms. While you may frown upon “hey youse!” as a mark of poor education, in fact it’s a perfectly reasonable way for the speaker to make clear they’re addressing the whole group, not just one person. Likewise with y’all, youse guys (New York mainly), yinz (Pennsylvania) and yees (Ireland).
What's more, standard English is inconsistent. We distinguish between I and we, and him/her and them. You is the only personal pronoun with just the one form for singular and plural. Purists take note: The hill you are so willing to die on is a jumbled boneheap hidden beneath a thin layer of turf and grass.
There was a time when English did distinguish between singular and plural you. Early English had thou, singular, and ye, plural (hence "hear ye, hear ye"). After the Norman invasion, thou gradually became a familiar form of address, and you a formal, deferential option. So if you were chatting with the king, he’d say “Woulds’t thou like a bowl of maggot-infested gruel?” and you would grovellingly reply “If it pleases you, Your Majesty”.
Then, around the 18th century, thou began to fall out of favour. The reasons are not entirely clear, but some commentators invoke an emerging spirit of egalitarianism.
Either way, that left you to do all the donkey work for both singular and plural references. And the so-called uneducated masses to first notice it, and then do something about it by inventing plural versions.
That led to horror among self-appointed language purists and a quandary for dictionary writers. Do they call the plurals of you actual words or pretend they don’t exist?
The trend is to acknowledge them, which is as it should be. Dictionaries are not judges but pulse takers. If a word has currency, even though a good number of people may think it an abomination, a decent dictionary will acknowledge its existence with or without some helpful commentary on its usage.
In the past, this approach has ruffled feathers in haughty places. In 1961, when Merriam-Webster’s Third New International Dictionary failed to condemn the use of like as a conjunction (as in the famous ad line “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should), The New York Times called the edition “bolshevik”, and the Chicago Daily News huffily wrote that the usage signified “a general decay in values”.
That Winston line was penned in 1954, and caused a minor uproar then. Walter Cronkite, the doyen of news anchormen at the time, refused to read it, even though Winston sponsored his show and he was contractually bound to do so. Maybe he was a Camel smoker.
Despite his objection, the line endured for nearly 20 years and is now regarded as one of the great classics of advertising. And the widespread use of like as a conjunction doesn’t seem to have caused the collapse of Western civilisation just yet.
Like like as a conjunction, youse is neat, clean, logical and unlikely to ruin the language. You don’t have to like it, but heaping scorn on it is not only illogical, it’s unjust.
Bits and specious
House is the only word in English in which the final fricative (s) changes to a z in the spoken plural form (that is: house, singular; but houzes, plural).
I know you’re trying to think of exceptions to what I just said. Good luck.
Spoonfeed is the longest word in English whose letters are arranged in reverse alphabetical order. If you have nothing else to do today, see if you can figure out the shortest word (11 letters long) in which all six vowels – a, e, i, o, u and y – occur in alphabetical order. Take a bow if you discover a 12-letter word too. Answers next issue.
Screeched is frequently cited as the longest one-syllable word in English. However, scratched, scrounged, scrunched, stretched, and the plural nouns straights and strengths also have nine letters each. And it doesn’t stop there. The 20-volume historical Oxford English Dictionary has scraughed, scrinched, scritched, scrooched, sprainged, spreathed, throughed, and thrutched. It also includes the ten-letter word scraunched, from the 1620 English translation of Cervantes’ Don Quixote.
Typewriter is the longest word you can make using keys from just one row of the keyboard.
Cost has two past tense forms, cost and costed (the second as in “we costed the project and decided it was too expensive”). The only other word I can think of that behaves in a similar way is fit, where British English calls for the past tense fitted, but American English prefers fit.
Quote of the week
If you have a big enough dictionary, just about everything is a word.
Dave Barry