'We' for 'I' in writing

[Wilson Gray]

On Jun 19, 2005, at 4:48 PM, Mark A. Mandel wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Mark A. Mandel" <mamandel at LDC.UPENN.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: 'We' for 'I' in writing
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> --------
>
> Larry writes:
>>>>>>
>  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:
>  <<<<<
>
> You can tell them from me

Didn't this concept used to be expressed as "... tell them _for_ me
..."? Or is this merely a case of a trivial difference in dialect?

-Wilson Gray

> that they're nuts and that they ought to be
> ashamed of themselves.
>
>
> -- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian,
>    Orthoepist, and Philological Busybody
>    a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel
>    [This text prepared with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.]
>