How Guy Fawkes Inadvertently Created The Word 'Guy'
The word "guy," as used today to indicate a "man, fellow, person, individual, creature," didn't exist in 1605. In fact, even the name Guy, a name with Norman French origins given to poor Guy Fawkes by his parents in 1570, was relatively rare in England at the time, according to the book "Remember, Remember" by James Sharpe — "Guy" himself had actually given up the name in 1603 and went by the name "Guido" instead.
With the arrest of Guy Fawkes shortly after midnight on November 5 1605 (a tip-off to a Catholic member of parliament led to an inspection of the cellars under parliament), however, it soon became an infamous name.
Fawkes originally gave his captors the name "John Johnson," but after a couple of days of horrific torture in the Tower of London, he gave himself and his co-conspirators up. He was hung, drawn, and quartered, with his remains sent to the four corners of the kingdom as a warning to future plotters.
What's more, November 5 was immediately established as a day of celebration, and while little is known about how exactly it was celebrated then, it gradually evolved into a nationalistic night of fireworks and bonfires, with effigies of Catholic figures such as Fawkes and even the Pope set alight.
Because of this tradition, the word "guy" began to be used in England to mean "effigy" and later came to be used in a pejorative sense to describe a man ("he's a bad guy"
or a usually a "weirdly dressed person," according to Parliament's history of Guy Fawkes Night.
At some point it spread to the United States, where, perhaps due to the lack of context, it began to be used in a wide variety of ways, not all negative. That American English usage later returned to United Kingdom, where it became common to use it to mean "man" or "person."
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/guy-fawkes-created-the-word-guy-2013-11
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