One thing that the return of rugby internationals confirms is that the word "guy" has almost completely colonised cis-Atlantic English, rather like rhododendron throughout the glens of Killarney, writes Kevin Myers.
All rugby players now refer to their team-mates as guys, eliminating those other amiable and traditional synonyms for "man" - "lad", "bloke", "chap". Indeed, the last word now has the whiff of slightly absurd gentility: for anyone to refer to a chap is to invite parody, as if the term were just a little Brigade of Guards and the Mall.
But it isn't, because in the Brigade of Guards too they all refer to one another as "guys". "Bloke", "lad" and "chap" are rapidly going the way of "wight", "swain" and "cove", and the complex thickets of the terminology of familiarity - a curiously male collection of words: there are no female equivalents - are yielding to the verbal rhododendron of "guy". And there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about it. Language goes entirely its own way: influences pass through it as if by a vast and unconscious act of group will.
For no one decides that young girls will start saying, "I'm like, omigod, no way, I so do not believe you" - though of course television is hugely important in such matters. Friends and Neighbours have been probably the most influential linguistic power-stations in the English language over the past decade. Neighbours has universalised the rising lilt at the end of ordinary indicative moods, as if they are questions. Friends has introduced a little army of linguistic devices to common English, the most common being the use of "so" as an adverbial intensifier.
Most of these will pass, and join "groovy", "far out", "hep to the jive", "daddy-oh" and "sock it to me" in the museum of fad-words that belonged to a particular time, but lacked the essential vitality to survive a small change in culture. They lost the Darwinian contest, and linguistic palaeontologists can pore over their fossils and wonder what it was that brought about their demise.
"Bloke" is probably a Shelta corruption of the Irish buachaill, for "boy". There is a theory that it was introduced by tinkers recruited into the Royal Navy in the 18th century, and it remained a naval word, like "mate", until a critical mass of ex-sailors in population centres such as Liverpool, Dublin and London made the term commonplace in Anglo-English and Hiberno-English.
"Chap" is like "fellow" - it was originally a commercial term. It is the same word as "cheap", when the latter simply meant a deal, a trade, and before it took its present meaning from "good cheap", meaning inexpensive. A trader was known as a "chapman" - which, truncated, gave us "chap". Far from being the caricature word it has since become, it was once commonplace in working-class areas of Belfast. Similarly, fellow - which, curiously, appears in robust rude health - comes from the Old Norse for fee-lay: someone to do business with.
For some reason, "chap" became associated in the popular mind with upper-middle-class twits, and rapidly fell out of favour, even in its heartland, the rugby clubs. Moreover, those stout garrisons would, one might have predicted, have clung on to the word "lad", especially in its plural form, as an invocative term. For the word had currency in the US, the main cultural engine of contemporary English. President Reagan used to say "lad" frequently, and it was a standard term used by American soldiers in the film Apocalypse Now. That was written in 1979. Now the word seems virtually to have vanished from the US and is vanishing in common Anglo- and Hiberno-English - though in both, it retains particular specific meanings. In Anglo-English, "laddish" is a largely uncomplimentary description of young male behaviour, and here "lads" retains a grisly presence as an affectionate euphemism for the IRA.
Until recently, an Irish rugby captain would have effortlessly referred to his fellow payers as chaps or lads - and would have urged them to fresh heroics with "Come on, lads!" Not any more. "Lad" is probably trooping off the linguistic stage, and much as we might deplore it, we can do little to prevent "guy" taking over completely. Guy comes from Guy Fawkes, and originally referred to the effigy which was burnt on the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot of 1606. I don't know whether the early English settlers celebrated Guy Fawkes night in the US: if they did, it was in time supplanted by the roughly cosynchronous Hallowe'en, probably introduced by Ulster immigrants. Yet the effigy-concept of the word "guy" remained in American-English, and in time mutated into an informal synonym for "man".
Guy certainly wasn't commonly used up until relatively recently. John O'Hara never seems to have used it, and if Dashiell Hammet did, I haven't been able to find where; however, Raymond Chandler and Damon Runyon certainly did use it. But in those days, it was an emphatically demotic term, and would not have been used by the professional classes.
Now the word is everywhere, and something within me dies whenever I hear a man of a certain age walk into a room and, instead of saying, "Hello everyone, nice to meet you," he does a small wave with an oh-so-cool hand, and says, "High guise". Or something like that.
Thus, almost precisely 400 years after his death, Guy Fawkes has finally achieved not the destruction of a Protestant parliament, but the destruction of almost every other affable synonym for "man". Makes you rather sorry he didn't succeed in the first place.