Thursday, January 13, 2011

New Year's Usage Resolution (Part 1)

All of us who shove words together for a living have our least favorite words, phrases or devices – things we try to avoid in our own writing and annoy us in the writing of others.

Crap. I used the editorial we. I hate the editorial we! At best its use is dishonest, implying that the writer speaks for many others when he is usually sitting alone at his keyboard in his pajamas.

That is, of course, unless he meets one of the criterion listed by Roscoe Conkling, a post-Civil War U.S. Senator, who said that “There are three classes of people who use ‘we’ instead of ‘I.’ They are emperors, editors and men with tapeworms.”

To the best of my knowledge, I am none of the above and therefore resolve to remain “we-free” in 2011.

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