“Guys, please have any loose items ready to place in the tray…”

“Only join this queue if you are eligible for priority boarding, guys…”

“Guys, please follow the yellow lines when exiting this area…”

Airport users will be familiar with hearing and obeying such instructions. We rustle, shuffle, stop, start, sucking up the inescapable prelude to airborne freedom, our inner eye fixed on the journey’s end.

But it’s the honorific I wish to dwell on here: “Guys”. Guys is the Japanese knotweed of modern English. It has conquered and strangled all older forms of politesse. This came home to me recently as I flew from England to Ireland. “Guys” all of my fellow passengers and I were in the eyes and on the lips of ground staff as we slouched through Heathrow; and “Guys” we all remained when disembarking at Shannon. In the past, we would, I suppose, have been “Ladies and Gents”, or we might have been somewhat coldly third-personed as “passengers” (“Could passengers please follow the yellow lines?”), or maybe subjected by a more light-hearted airport official to something a little playful like “Boys and girls”.  

But neither Hiberno-English nor Anglo-English has found the wherewithal to resist the march of the guys. It is relentless. A few weeks ago, I was in Parliament Square on the day of the state opening and I overheard a policeman addressing three bemused elderly Japanese tourists, a man and two women, with an “Excuse me, guys”. I went for dinner recently with three others, all of us in our fifties, two men and two women. Along came the affable teenage waiter with an “OK, guys?” Listen out too for “guys” being used by someone who in the next or even the same breath is bemoaning American cultural hegemony.

The word has three primary characteristics: brevity, informality, androgyny. A perfect linguistic brew for our times, one might say; a blandishment ideal for use in those multiplying parts of the modern world that are “desacralised, unserious, and predominantly commercialised” (Michael Millerman).  Yet it is hard to say with any exactitude when “guys”, newly gender indeterminate, cleared the field of all competitors. Guys & Dolls premiered in 1950 when the term’s gendered status would presumably have seemed unassailable. Similarly, when Liotta, Pesci and De Niro wise guy-ed their way through the sixties and seventies in Goodfellas, there was no hint of an equal opportunities agenda encroaching. When Five Guys Named Mo took the West End by storm in 1990, you knew you were going to hear five men sing and dance. And when Garrison Keillor published The Book of Guys in 1993, the term still meant one sex and once sex only.  

However, my edition of the Shorter Oxford English, also from 1993, has the following entry as its third meaning for guy n: “A man, a fellow; in pl. also (chiefly N. Amer.), people (of either sex). colloq. (orig. N. Amer.)”. So when did we reach the point of no return? To be all sub-Larkiny about it: I think it might have been somewhere between the final episode of Friends and the second Spider-Man reboot?    It is a classic instance of a reality you wake up to, rather than witness coming to be.  

It should be added that the line is holding in places. I’ve noticed that announcements made over public address systems tend not to make “Guys” of us all. Pressing a mike to your lips, knowing that your message will be invested with the authority of the tannoy, seems to trigger some reflex decorum.   

And there are some upsides to “guys”. Most words exist for good reason. The term is undoubtedly flexible and friendly, both good things; and it can be used to convey affability, fellow feeling, a certain loose-limbed esprit de corps among total strangers. Automatic, unthinking deference always needs to be kept in check and “guys” also makes a good job of that. Defenders might even say that usages like “guys” can be part of a vast linguistic firewall against divisiveness in febrile times.  

… diversity is unquestionably our strength when it comes to language

There are even certain uses that I quite like, such as parents talking affectionately about “our guys” and “your guys” when discussing the fortunes of their respective broods. And I also know people who used the term habitually long before the current miasmic application and from their lips “guy”, miraculously, retains its power.

Is this an over-reaction, then? Maybe. But diversity is unquestionably our strength when it comes to language, and to expressing nuance, irony, and subtler intentions. It is no fun, really, to witness this remorseless flattening of all the diverse resources the English language has for addressing and naming our fellow humans, this kind of homogenisation, which is now escaping words and spreading to imagery: Look at the ubiquity of Commercial Memphis, the graphic design style that has so spectacularly conquered the field of illustration, reducing all humans to assortments of pastel-coloured, bulging-limbed, interchangeable, near-featureless, flattened marshmallow-people.  

I see no release. Get used to it, guys.