'We' for 'I' in writing

[Jonathan Lighter]

"As I have seen in Chapter 2..."

It's like the T-shirts that say, "I'm schizophrenic and so am I"

I love it!

JL

Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Laurence Horn
Subject: Re: 'We' for 'I' in writing
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At 10:01 PM -0400 6/16/05, RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:
>If we have discussed this before, I apologize. What I want to know is how one
>might communicate to the folks who created MicrosoftWord's grammar checker
>that some of their advice is totally crazy. For example, in a legal document I
>wrote:
>
>"During the academic year 2005-6 I will chair both the Linguistics Program
>and the Department of English at Duke. ..."
>
>Word insists that this should be changed to read, "During the academic year
>2005-6 we will chair both the Linguistics Program and the Department
>of English
>at Duke. ..."
>
>I have gained a little weight since January, but not enough to qualify me as
>plural. Nor am I the queen of England (who is reported to have once said, "We
>and our husband are glad"). Nor am I a nurse--who apparently can get away with
>saying things like "It is time for our enema" (oh, but that is a different
>'we'--here it means 'you'). Could this be some kind of Yankee reflex of the
>mysterious, ghostly, singular Y'ALL?
>
>Does ANYBODY teach students to write papers in which they refer to themselves
>as crowds of people or stuffy old queens? That is soooo 1930s, it seems to me
>(us?)

It's a consequence of the law of preservation of number. It's the
fault of the copy-editors at the U. of Chicago Press who (when they
can tear themselves away from their "which"es and "that"s) insist on
changing all 1st person plurals--including the joint
me-author-and-you-reader-are-in-this-together "we"--to singulars, so
that my references to e.g.

As we have seen in Chapter 2,...
We can see from these examples that...
We can distinguish the following cases:

were systematically changed to

As I have seen in Chapter 2,...
I can see from these examples that...
I can distinguish the following cases:

Larry

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