You guys

"Who are you examining?"

"You," he whispered to her immensity. In English it could be plural or singular. English was a fine language for prevarication.

Elizabeth McCracken, Bowlaway

When you are sitting in a restaurant with a group of people — perhaps it's a group of men and women, or perhaps a group of men or women, or perhaps just your family — how is your server likely to address you? Chances are, in most restaurants in the United States, what you will hear is "you guys," as in, "Are you guys ready to order?"

There are those, perhaps women of a certain age, who still resent this, but most of us have gotten used to it by now. In an age when it is considered sexist to use a masculine pronoun to refer to someone who may be either male or female, somehow it has become permissible to refer to both men and women as guys. Go figure.

The reason has a lot to do with that oddity in the English language, one of many, that makes the personal pronoun you both singular and plural. We all learned this in school. We understand it. Yet most of us have never felt comfortable using the plural you.  Something always seems to be missing. That's why people down South say "you all" and those in other parts of the county often say something like youse or you'uns. I once had a pastor, raised in eastern Pennsylvania with degrees from Swarthmore and Harvard, who referred to groups as "you all." The word you just seems somehow inadequate when addressing more than one person.

Go back a few hundred years and the English language didn't have this problem. One person was addressed with the pronoun thou. For two or more people, the word was ye. Simple, right? Yet somehow the two words got combined into a single, all-purpose you. After all these centuries we still haven't fully accepted it.

Perhaps it's time to bring back ye.