Today’s blog will deal with the nuances of grammar. 🙂
Take a look at the following sentences.
1. I should always think of others before I think of myself.
2. You should always think of others before you think of yourself.
3. He should always think of others before he thinks of himself.
In formal papers, you are not always allowed to use first or second pronouns.That leaves third person, sentence, but in singular, third person is problematic because it specifies gender. In an attempt to avoid this, the error of using third person plural in such situations has crept into modern English.
4. A person should always think of others before they think of themselves.
The error in this case, is that the antecedent “a person” is singular and therefore cannot correspond to the pronouns ‘they’ and ‘themselves’. One way to get rid of this gender issue, is to make use of the word ‘one’.
5. One should always think of others before one thinks of oneself.
The word ‘one’ may act as an indefinite pronoun in the English language. It is a gender-neutral, third-person singular pronoun. One is most often used as a subject (nominative case) but can also be used as an object (one) and possessive (one’s).
Subject (nominative case):
• One cannot help thinking the worst of him.
Direct object (objective case):
• Too much study makes one drowsy
Possessive case:
• There is no place like one’s own home.
Reflexive form:
• To love God is to secure oneself for eternity.
As an indefinite pronoun, ‘one’ functions in an impersonal, objective manner. It stands for the writer, for all people who are like the writer, for the average person, or for all people who belong to a certain class. In the United States, ‘one’ is sometimes perceived to have a literary or pretentious feel to it; the more it is used, the more pretentious it feels. In the United States, ‘one’ is often replaced by ‘you’, as we will discuss in the next two lessons. In Britain the use of the indefinite or generic ‘one’ is commonplace and carries no such stigma. For example,
• One [you] would think the end of the world had come.
• The speaker was awful; one [you] felt embarrassed for him.
Let us take this particular form of one of the Commandments:
a. One should honor one’s parents.
It is a sentence which makes correct use of the indefinite pronoun ‘one’. Some may find it a bit stilted. In an attempt to make it less stilted, two variations have been proposed and accepted as proper grammar in America (but not in Britain, Canada, or any other country that uses British grammar). Either
b. One should honor his parents
or the more gender neutral,
c. One should honor his or her parents.
Constructions b and c are considered proper grammar in America. Both aim to lessen the formality of the one/one’s construction. In either case, much as both b and c are accepted usage, neither is grammatically correct. Grammatical correctness requires that the indefinite pronoun ‘one’ be consistently used throughout the sentence. This is not the case in either b or c. ‘One’ is indefinite, and ‘he’ is definite. The two cannot grammatically (or logically) refer to the same person in the same sentence.
Though we yield to accepted usage of the times, we discourage you from slipping into the habit of letting your pronouns and antecedents get out of sync with each other. (Cicero and Harvey both would turn in their graves at the mere mention of the possibility.) The proper form is, “One loves one’s friends” even if it sounds less stilted to say, “One loves his friends”.
We encourage you to read through Dickens, Austen, Trollope, and other British writers of the nineteenth century, whose writings are replete with the indefinite pronoun ‘one’. What you will find is that it is used sparingly (only one or two instances per page), and that any form of ‘one’ (one, one’s, oneself) is rarely used more than once in the same sentence. Here are a few examples from Jane Austen:
• A fortnight’s acquaintance is certainly very little. One cannot know what a man really is by the end of a fortnight.
• No one can be really esteemed accomplished who does not greatly surpass what is usually met with.
• It is difficult indeed—it is distressing. One does not know what to think.
• I beg your pardon; one knows exactly what to think.
• She is the sort of woman whom one cannot regard with too much deference.
• One may be continually abusive without saying anything just; but one cannot always be laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty.
• One should avoid pretentious and useless words.
For you as a writer, grammatical and stylistic consistency is of first importance. Whatever tone you choose to write in, you need to use it consistently and correctly. You may choose to use ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘he’, ‘one’, or ‘a person’ when you refer to someone in a paragraph, but be consistent. The fact that some people are too thickheaded to grasp, for example, that ‘anyone’ is singular, as the ‘one’ in it plainly denotes, does not oblige those who know better to tolerate “anyone can do as they please.” The correct form is, of course, “anyone may do as he pleases,” but in America, in informal usage, ‘can’ has pretty much replaced ‘may’ in this sense, and there is nothing more to be done about it; but we cannot and must not let “one” become plural. That way madness lies.
~ Geoffrey Nunberg
In other words, Mr. Nunberg is warning against the odious construction, “One should honor their parents”. That construction violates not only the indefinite/definite pronoun issue, it also has a singular subject referred to in the plural. But then, no student well schooled in grammar would commit that atrocity, except as a momentary lapse.
Example
Rewrite the sentence by substituting the appropriate noun or pronoun for ‘one’:
One should have one’s own protractor if one is a geometry student.
Basically we take every instance of a form of the word, ‘one’, and choose to write it as ‘a person’ with the accompanying appropriate pronoun ‘he’ instead. A person should have his own protractor if he is a geometry student. Now, revise again to eliminate any agreement problems and any awkward or wordy constructions. In this case, since both men and women may be geometry students, some may prefer to rewrite this in a simpler construction that avoids all gender references.
A geometry student should own a protractor.