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[This piece was published a few years back in the Columbus Bar Association Lawyers Quarterly magazine. Because the state of our language continues its spiral decline, I’m posting it here.]

It’s almost too much to bear.  It’s enough to make my head explode. Our English language is slowly degrading to a point where things that were once considered to be bad grammar and offensive slang are now slowly becoming the new standards.

Using the correct pronoun after a conjunction is a lost art. No one these days gets the following phrase correct: “Contact either Joe or me.” Instead, you will always hear, “Contact either Joe or I.”  Perhaps the problem is that we no longer have nuns whacking grade school students on the backs of their hands for these grammatical sins, but it’s not just the loss of tough nuns that has created this problem; bad grammar knows no religious boundaries. Still, I wonder why the problem seems to be getting worse.

Could it be that I’m just getting older and, therefore, grumpier, or (as I prefer to think) are people just getting increasingly lazy about the rules? Maybe I’m just old fashioned. I wear suspenders and pleated pants, and I don’t wear my ball cap backwards.

In any case, the latest source of frustration for me is the phrase, “you guys.”  Oh, my, how I have grown to hate this phrase. For reasons unknown, it has come to replace the second person, plural form of “you.” It is almost a given that when addressing a group, a person will ask, “What are you guys doing?” Apparently, to ask, “What are you doing” would leave some doubt regarding who is being addressed.

I heard Savannah Guthrie on The Today Show ask a mother and her daughters, “What did this mean for you guys?” (I was watching morning TV because I was on vacation.)  So, a mid-30’s mom and her two middle school-age daughters are “guys?” Something is wrong here. I suspect Walter Cronkite is rolling in his grave.

I’ve heard young adult women address each other as “you guys.” I don’t get it. I’ve heard attorneys use the same slang when addressing a jury. “Now, when you go into the jury room, I want you guys to think about . . .”  Really? What’s next? Maybe, “Sup, Judge?”

But wait, there’s more. People have tried to use “you guys” as a plural, possessive adjective. Instead of hearing, “I like your house,” you will often hear, “I like you guys’ house” or perhaps “your guys’ house” and—my favorite—“your guyses’ house.” The only good thing about such bad grammar is that it provides a moment of amusement.  Because none of these phrases rolls off the tongue, you can sense a speaker’s discomfort in trying to articulate a phrase that, down deep, he knows isn’t quite right yet feels compelled to say anyway. It’s sort of a verbal stumbling.

When my wife and I were dining at a restaurant some weeks back, our waiter, a nice young man, ended practically every phrase with “you guys.”  “How are you guys this evening? .  .  . Can I get a drink for you guys? .  .  .  How does everything taste, you guys?”  The server who brought the appetizer asked, “One of you guys had the meatball?”  I admit my wife has to muster a certain amount of fortitude and stamina to put up with me, but I don’t think that merits her being called a “guy.” Need I speak of the age difference between the waiter and either my wife or me?

A friend of mine commented that the use of “you guys” is emblematic of an overall change in our language that requires adjustment from grumps like me.  Oh, please. Sure, language changes over time.  We no longer say things like, “That’s jolly good, old boy,” which, according to Doris Kearns Goodwin in The Bully Pulpit, was how people spoke in the days of Teddy Roosevelt. “You guys” is in another category. It is slang that goes too far and denigrates our language, and language—the thing that connects and defines us—is too important. When we allow our language to degrade, we lose something important.

I’ll admit there’s a place in the world for “you guys” or some derivative.  If you live in New Jersey, you can refer to your friends as “yous guys.” If you live in Chicago, it makes sense to refer to the people in the next neighborhood as “dem guys.” If you’re a cop in New York City, everyone would understand if you referred to the local Mafioso as “wise guys.”

If you’re a guy greeting the other guys in your golf league, it’s acceptable to say, “How are you guys doing this afternoon?”  There are other acceptable uses, but generally they should be limited in frequency and, for the most part, to exchanges between males who are contemporaries.

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Jack D’Aurora writes for Considerthisbyjd.com

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Also published on Medium.