"It's not unusual for the male to include the female and for the female not to include the male. Think about clothes; it's common for women to wear clothes that look like men's clothes, but for a man to wear very feminine clothes is different," she said.
Only in the plural is a woman likely to be called a guy. "You can say, `Call Mary and Jane and see if those guys want to come to dinner tonight,'" notes Geoffrey Nunberg, a professor at Stanford, "but you can't say, `I wanted to invite Alice, but the guy wasn't answering her calls.' This usage may be related to the tendency to use guy as a kind of perky pseudo-pronoun -- nowadays you hear people using a phrase like `those guys' to refer to everything from ski boots to PowerPoint slides."
I would agree that the case is made for guy in the singular to apply to a man, but my "cable guy" is a woman.
ANKLE OF AMBIGUITY
A Viacom "group prexy ... has ankled the company in a surprise move," reported Variety, and on the same front page headlined a shakeup at Paramount studios, "Tobey ankles in Par revamp." Bernard Ferrari of New York sent along the clipping with the query "Why such equivocation?"
Diplomats call such a use of language "creative ambiguity." Variety, the "show-biz bible" that celebrates its 100th anniversary this month, likes the verb to ankle because it has always reveled in the jargon of the industry it covers. Some familiar words, like punch line and payola, first appeared in Variety; a hundred other whammo coinages were popularized there.
"Variety was founded in 1905 and used street lingo," says Tim Gray. "It was fun, and easier to say a play `had legs,' for example, than to say it had a good chance of running a long time."
Why ankle, which has long had a general slang meaning of "to walk?"
"Hollywood is filled with egos. A lot of times, a studio will tell us that they let somebody go, and the exec will say, `I wasn't fired, I quit!' Both sides claim it was their decision. We need that equivocation," he said.
Why not depart, leave or exit? Gray's answer: "Ankle is more fun." (I would have checked this out with a scribbler source, but he left to ink a pact to pen a blind put pilot for a boffo biopic.)
Gray is Variety's new editor. Years ago, his predecessor, Jonathan Taylor, ankled.
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