In New York Times’ (August 13) article titled, “Summers of our discontent,” Maureen Dowd manifests her objection to the possible nomination of Larry Summers by President Obama by asking, “Does the fact that we’ve had no female Fed chairs and no female Treasury secretaries mean that Summers was right when he said women are less likely to have the kind of brains that would allow them to get top jobs requiring math skills?
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/14/opinion/dowd-summers-of-our-discontent.html?hp&_r=0Summers
And she asks;
“But the idea that it is somehow historically inevitable that the
chairmanship of the Federal Reserve should go to Summers, that it
belongs to him, that he would be an enthusiastic enforcer of bank
regulation to protect the little guy? I have my doubts.”
Who is “the little guy”? Does it mean the weak, or small loan borrowers? Is it a single person or entity? Why is it in the singular form when it refers to guy, a countable noun – I mean, why it is 'the guy," not "the guys" when it indicates guys in a social group or class?
Best Answer
The big guy and the little guy are metaphorical ways of referring to the distinction between corporations or individuals with lots of political and/or economic power and individuals with little or no political and/or economic power. So yes, in this case it means the weak, or more precisely, people in the middle or lower classes that have less individual power—people that are more personally influenced by local economic conditions.
Neither the big guy nor the little guy is a single entity. Both are collective terms describing entire economic classes.
Grammatically, the terms are indeed countable. The plural forms, the big guys and the little guys, can be used almost interchangeably with their singular forms, although they are much less common.
On a side note, I had speculated that the big guy / little guy distinction might have arisen from Big Brother, a character in George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, but it's been pointed out (see comments) that these terms predate the novel by at least several years.