11/5/2023 0 Comments Ny times y all youse you guysWe’ve seen substantial changes in our language since then. President Obama used to end his news conferences with “Thanks you guys I appreciate it” – but that was already four years ago (and what a long four years that has been). But how do modern English-speakers – especially female and non-binary folks – respond to that catch-all term used to conveniently and informally address a group of people in the absence of a genderless second person plural in standard English (which German-, Turkish- and Gaelic-speakers, among others, are lucky enough to have in their linguistic toolkits)?Ībout seven years ago Glossophilia published a post called “ Boys will be guys,” which looked at the word guy in all its guises, including how it’s used in the plural to mean “multiple people regardless of their gender.” Admittedly a lighthearted and anecdotal post, it portrayed guys as a perfectly acceptable/accepted term that few objected to at the time. Personally, most of the significant people in my life, friends and family, live in the NY or CA area and share similar political views – thus it makes sense from my experience that we do also tend to speak the same.Is “you guys” no longer appropriate to use in our more enlightened gender-neutral speech? It has an undeniably male “twang” to it, that’s for sure. Therefore, it would make sense that people would subconsciously speak more alike those they surround themselves with – a form of copying in information cascades. From this, I infer that those who have similar political views tend to have positive relationships and therefore have more overall interaction (not just politically). The areas on my heat map that are red (or of the warmer colors) match similarly to the blue states shown from the election. I am not very political, but I would identify myself to be closer on the liberal and democratic end of the spectrum. We can observe some similarities between my regional dialect heat map and the presidential election map. I chose to look at this year since the data that the quiz is based off is from 2013. Below is a map of the 2012 presidential election results. In addition to the relevance this quiz has to what we’ve learned in Networks, we can see some evidence of network effects and information cascades (specifically the aspect of copying others, especially those we align with). And the results are pretty accurate! I am from Scarsdale, NY – just a 10 min drive to Yonkers, the city that the quiz predicted. Using Bayes’ Theorem: P(from X region|answer) = / P(answer), Josh Katz was able to calculate where you (the one taking the quiz) are most likely from. As an example, I took the quiz and posted my results below.Īfter answering each of the 25 questions, a similar heat map is shown depicting which regions answered the most and least like you had. The three smaller maps show which answer most contributed to those cities chosen to be the most similar to you. The colors on the large heat map correspond to the probability that a randomly selected person in that location would respond to a randomly selected survey question the same way that you did. The questions asked in this quiz are based off the Harvard Dialect Survey, a linguistics project begun in 2002 by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder. The data for the quiz and its results come from more than 350,000 survey responses collected between August and October, 2013. The results of this quiz are shown in heat maps that give us a visualization of American regional dialects. This link brings us to a quiz developed by New York Times graphics editor Josh Katz.
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