I heard this yesterday morning on National Public Radio.
Problem:
The possessive form was wrong.
Explanation:
An NPR reporter had recorded someone saying to a group of people, “I went through your guys’s notes.”
Without any more context to help you, you can see that there are two possible interpretations for this statement:
- The speaker was saying that he had read the notes of the guys who belonged to or were associated with his listeners.
- The speaker was saying that he had read the notes that belonged to his listeners.
If the full context were such that interpretation #1 were correct, then the solution would be to remove the final “s” from “guys’s” in the statement.
However, the full context of the recording was someone speaking directly to a group and not referring to anyone else.
So interpretation #2 is the correct one.
One can then almost see the train of thought of the speaker when he started to say, “I went through your guys’s notes.”
Step 1: The speaker usually says “you guys” instead of “you” for the plural, second-person pronoun.
Step 2: Starting to make a possessive out of “you guys”, the speaker changed “you” to “yours”.
Step 3: Realizing that “your guys” sounded as if he were referring to people other than his listeners, the speaker added the possessive apostrophe-“s” to “guys” to create “your guys’s”.
Now here is the sad part about this NPR report: The man who was recorded saying the statement “I went through your guys’s notes.” was directly involved in a job-interviewing activity.
Ouch!
Solution:
“I went through your notes.”