n Scottish plural form of “you”: Are yous coming out later? When alien civilisations try to crack the English language, several things will make them wonder how on earth anyone managed to communicate using it. One of these things will be the fact that “pound” was both a unit of weight and a unit of currency. Another will be that “pint” represented two different volumes on different sides of our tiny planet. Perhaps the most confounding will be the fact that we had no way to make a distinction between addressing one single person, or several thousand.