About a month ago, a friend and I were speaking with a lady at a local museum. My friend used the word "guys" to reference the lady, her husband, and their friend as a group. The lady took slight offense at this and pressed the point home for a minute that she was most certainly a woman. My friend is pretty soft-spoken, so I threw in an apologetic chuckle about how I often use "guys" to refer to multi-sex groups.
Do you reference and address groups comprising both sexes as "guys"? Do you have another term you prefer?
Are you offended or do you dislike when you're automatically referred to as a "guy" when in a group?
Just for the record, I think the English language desperately needs a gender-neutral way to refer to a singular third party, and another for plural second party address.
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