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Comment by DiggyJohnson | Hacker News Reader

To start the discussion off on a thorny point: I recently got “called out” on addressing a group of people as “guys” on account of the interpretation that I’m assuming a single gender. This really frustrated me, and seemed extremely uncalled for. I can remember teachers in school say “cmon guys settle down now” to refer to their co-ed classrooms.

Is there any response I could give to this out-of-the-blue criticism besides quietly judging the requester and moving on? I make very little apology for using language in this way, and I was surprised it was interpreted in the most inflammatory way possible.

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They are trying to get power over you. Best to just shrug and ignore, making as little of it as possible. Trolls grow in power the more you feed them - so take it the same as it someone posts a troll comment in reply to a forum post. Just ignore

Reminds me of my coworker who used to come in every day and greet our all-male office with "morning ladies!"

This soon stopped just before our first female colleague joined. Our boss pulled us all in to a meeting to inform us that we now have to use gender-neutral terms like "folks" and "peeps", and there was to be no more joking around gendered forms of address. What a spoilsport.

There are many possible responses, it depends what your goal is. If you just care about making your audience comfortable, you can say "my bad, folks" and then move on and forget about it forever. If you want to understand what the issue could possibly be, you could approach that person afterwards and ask them why they called you out and why they don't want to be referred to as a "guy". If you only care about being right, you could argue with them on the spot.

The place at worked at one job ago had a Slack bot set up so that if you said "guys" in any public channel, it would spit out a message like "Maybe use different word instead?"

It was about as efffective and intelligent as it sounds. /s

> it was about as effective and intelligent as it sounds. /s

fascinated by this "/s"

I don’t think such an uncharitable interpretation deserves any response.

I’ve always considered it a non gendered term of endearment. As a reference to how children would dress up as Guy Fawkes at parades in the UK.

You didn’t use the word incorrectly. They are just an asshole.

“Guys” as a collective noun has no sex/gender. It’s as gendered as “y’all”. Words can have different meanings.

Fuck those people.

"Please don't fulminate."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You should have instantly corrected yourself to "guys and communist fifthcolumnists" and carried on.

welcome to the 21st century. you may want to reply with an even bigger virtue signal

Have you considered that you may be wrong?

Have you considered using a handle that isn't a derogatory term?

It's my heritage, and a completely irrelevant topic.

The person who called you out sounds like a loser who spends too much time in their weirdo bubble online or in some sort of extreme activist community in person. This sort of thing has been leaking out into the rest of society lately and when it does we should ridicule it and the people who hold those beliefs. Commence the downvotes.

I don't understand why people are so sensitive these days!

Just don't use "guys" and move on. Easy.

Or just use "guys" and move on. The move on is the important part.

Absolutely, which is why it's so funny that the commenter here is using their "frustration" and the "uncalled for" nature of their reaction to justify wanting to continue to use "guys". This guy should just drop it and move on, easy. Cut the sensitivity out and just, move on.

People choosing to be (or just acting, you can't tell for sure) over inconsequential word choices never ceases to amaze.

Yeah some men are so sensitive over this that they'll literally rush out to write "academic" papers about it! Just get over it, dude.

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