You’d never believe how much time I spend with my college freshmen, unteaching them what they’ve been taught in high school. For instance, they tell me that you should never use the pronoun you in an indefinite sense, meaning someone or one. If you do, you’re a stylistic redneck.
“One must lift the tip of one’s nose to the cup, just so,” says Monsieur Lemonnier, removing his pince-nez for the purpose, “and flare one’s nostrils so as to let the bouquet of the wine enter into one with the most effective effluvia.”
“Enter into one what?” says Bobby Joe.
The indefinite you is perfectly fine for almost all kinds of writing. Oh, not for the description of scientific experiments, I grant. “Well, first you drip this red stuff here into that there tube”—I don’t think that will do for a journal article. But for popular writing, and even for conversational writing admitting of a high intellectual tenor, the use is admissible and often preferable to the alternatives. In those cases, it beats the heck out of all those ones.
January 14th, 2013 | 10:31 am
This is good to know. One gets weary of one’s excessive use of “ones” and one would think that one would find a better way.
January 14th, 2013 | 11:24 am
It’s worse now that you can’t use “he” as an all-purpose pronoun. (A bi-gender pronoun?) “One’s bad writing will be corrected by his professor” would be jumped on immediately and changed to “his or her professor” or, more barbarically, “their professor.” So “you” is even more useful than it was in the past.
January 14th, 2013 | 4:13 pm
“It’s worse now that you can’t use “he” as an all-purpose pronoun.”
I use “he” for that purpose anyway and point out to complainants that, in their insistence on so-called “inclusive language”, they themselves have been busy making it more difficult to include both sexes when one is either writing or speaking. Nonetheless, my “he” in such instances as Judy alludes to is inclusive, even if my complainants’ is not.
January 14th, 2013 | 5:27 pm
I use “mankind” and “man” and so forth all the time, and I notice that most of my students do, too, and my colleagues, male and female, when they are lecturing. It’s natural, and everybody understands it.
As for “gender,” I use it only to refer to the grammatical categories. Some people may prefer to possess a gender, I say, but not this Italian …
January 16th, 2013 | 10:16 am
The elimination of the universal “He /Him /His / Mankind” has always unsettled me. Then one day, as I was teaching genetics to my Biology class the solution presented itself.
The male of the species has one gene from each sex and is, therefore, representative of the entire species. For me, problem solved.
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