Anti-we
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"Against We", by Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution (11/28/25)
Quoting the author:
I propose a moratorium on the generalized first-person plural for all blog posts, social media comments, opinion writing, headline writers, for all of December. No “we, “us,” or “our,” unless the “we” is made explicit.
No more “we’re living in a golden age,” “we need to talk about,” “we can’t stop talking about,” “we need to wise up.” They’re endless. “We’ve never seen numbers like this.” “We are not likely to forget.” “We need not mourn for the past.” “What exactly are we trying to fix?” “How are we raising our children?” “I hate that these are our choices.”
…“We” is what linguists call a deictic word. It has no meaning without context. It is a pointer. If I say “here,” it means nothing unless you can see where I am standing. If I say “we,” it means nothing unless you know who is standing next to me.
…in a headline like “Do we need to ban phones in schools?” the “we” is slippery. The linguist Norman Fairclough called this way of speaking to a mass audience as if they were close friends synthetic personalization. The “we” creates fake intimacy and fake equality.
Nietzsche thought a lot about how language is psychology. He would look askance at the “we” in posts like “should we ban ugly buildings?” He might ask: who are you that you do not put yourself in the role of the doer or the doing? Are you a lion or a lamb?
Perhaps you are simply a coward hiding in the herd, Martin Heidegger might say, with das Man. Don’t be an LLM. Be like Carol!
Hannah Arendt would say you’re dodging the blame. “Where all are guilty, nobody is.” Did you have a hand in the policy you are now critiquing? Own up to your role.
Perhaps you are confusing your privileged perch with the broader human condition. Roland Barthes called this ex-nomination. You don’t really want to admit that you are in a distinct pundit class, so you see your views as universal laws.
Adorno would say you are selling a fake membership with your “jargon of authenticity,” offering the reader membership in your club. As E. Nelson Bridwell in the old Mad Magazine had it: What do you mean We?
…If you are speaking for a very specific we, then say so. As Mark Twain is said to have said, “only presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms ought to have the right to use we.”
I could go on. But you get the drift. The bottom line is that “we” is squishy. I is the brave pronoun. I is the hardier pronoun. I is the—dare I say it—manly pronoun.
I agree.
So much for the "royal we" among the Decembrists — the novel, not the band.
The Decembrists (Russian: Декабристы, Dekabristy) is an unfinished novel by Leo Tolstoy, who finished three chapters. Its hero was to have been a participant in the abortive Decembrist Uprising of 1825, released from Siberian exile after 1856. It was intended as a sequel to War and Peace, and the second part of a planned trilogy, whose third part would be set in 1856.
The band's name refers to the Decembrist revolt, an 1825 insurrection in Imperial Russia. Meloy has stated that the name is also meant to invoke the "drama and melancholy" of the month of December.
As I have stated elsewhere, my wife (Li-ching Chang) would do anything to avoid the use of the first-person singular pronoun ("I" / "Wǒ 我"). However, she was not averse to the second-person pronoun, whether singular or plural.
Selected readings
- "Me, myself, and I" (4/5/22)
- "Why We?", by Jeremy Gordon, Pacific Standard (11/7/13)
[h.t. Leslie Katz]
Joe said,
December 8, 2025 @ 9:09 pm
When a casual (unedited) author writes "we" without an antecedent, it actually does mean something -a lot – but nothing the author has intended or considered. It tends to mean "you and me", and therein is the huge unexamined assumption about who their reader is: maybe someone in the same country, the same class, the same race, the same generation, etc. You know, normal people. Reverse-engineer a piece to work out who the author thinks "we" are and you can trace the outline of their giant gaping blind spot.
Ryan said,
December 8, 2025 @ 9:43 pm
I instinctively close or turn the page on opinion pieces and blogs that use we. I agree with Joe that their assumption of we says a lot about them.
wgj said,
December 8, 2025 @ 10:15 pm
How is "Should we ban cellphones in schools" different from "Should cellphones be banned in schools"? The English grammar demands a mandatory subject, so we (yes, we) put a placeholder subject like "we" when we don't want to be more specific. In contrast, Chinese grammer allows the subject to be omitted, and we can say things like 应当禁止校园内用手机吗 (Should ban use of cellphones in schools). Official party and state document in China are full of sentences that begin with "should", "need", "promote", "safeguard" without specifying the subject (is it the leadership, the bureaucracy, the people, all of society?).
Chris Button said,
December 8, 2025 @ 11:26 pm
Can a French journalist get away with it if they use "nous" instead of informal "on"? Or is it equally grating because it's artificially inclusive regardless?
Anthony said,
December 9, 2025 @ 6:52 am
It's rare to find a single-author scientific paper these days, so let's look at math. Alongside "One observes how each of these operations corresponds to an axiom of ZF," there are numerous uses of "we" and "our." Thus: "For all P and A, we do not have both P forces A and P forces ~A." (Single author: Paul J. Cohen) Use of "we" or not seems to be elegant variation; the quotation about forcing could easily be rewritten without "we."
Philip Taylor said,
December 9, 2025 @ 7:37 am
In scientific papers, I normally assume that "we" denotes author and reader and is therefore correct and justified. (I was going to add that for some years I had the pleasure of working with Professor Cohen but I then realised that it was his near-namesake, Professor Paul M Cohn, with whom I used to work).
VVOV said,
December 9, 2025 @ 8:18 am
I was curious to fact-check if the “tapeworm” quote is actually by Mark Twain. It is not: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/13/we/
As for the substance of the post, I agree with wgj that this is a consequence of English grammar requiring a mandatory subject. I suspect that the author of the extensively quoted substack post is really reacting to the *tone* of writings that use constructions like “we need to talk about XYZ” rather than their content.
VVOV said,
December 9, 2025 @ 8:25 am
PS. Ben Zimmer handled the same theme in an old NYT column that includes an exploration of the apocryphal “tapeworm” quote, along with a more intense 19th c. companion:
‘As the fiery preacher Thomas De Witt Talmage wrote in 1875: “They who go skulking about under the editorial ‘we,’ unwilling to acknowledge their identity, are more fit for Delaware whipping-posts than the position of public educators.”’
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/magazine/03FOB-onlanguage-t.html
Victor Mair said,
December 9, 2025 @ 8:27 am
This is a topic that has been discussed a number of times on Language Log under the rubric of "zero anaphora".
"If you can't say something nice…" (12/5/17)
"Luv u" (4/29/17) — aversion to personal pronouns, especially the first person
See also:
Keith Vander Linden, Zhihua Long, and Liang Tao, "Chinese Zero Anaphora in Translation: A Preliminary System" in Victor H. Mair and Yongquan Liu, eds., Characters and Computers (Amsterdam, Oxford, Washington, Tokyo: IOS Press, 1991).
Peter Cyrus said,
December 9, 2025 @ 8:31 am
Yes, it's true that we often use "we" as a general pronoun – what's the problem? In that sentence, I could have said "people", but it sounds accusatory: ignorant people do that, but I never would. French "on" and German "man" face the same accusation. I could have said «"we" is often used …», but it sounds non-committal, bureaucratese, and feeble.
A picky logician might say that in the sentence «Dogs have four legs», I (needlessly specific) haven't specified which dogs, and they (singular!) might propose a circumlocution involving ∀ and ∃. But when I order my confit de canard next door, I don't tell them which one to bring me.
Peter McGoron said,
December 9, 2025 @ 9:22 am
No discussion of the use of "we" in scientific papers is complete without mentioning J. H. Hetherington, F. D. C. Willard, Phys. Rev. Lett. 35, 1442 (1975).
> In 1975, the American physicist and mathematician Jack H. Hetherington of Michigan State University wanted to publish some of his research results in the field of low-temperature physics in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters. A colleague, to whom he had given his paper for review, pointed out that Hetherington had used the first person plural, "we", in his text, and that the journal would reject this form on submissions with a sole author. Rather than take the time to retype the article to use the singular form, or to bring in a co-author, Hetherington decided to invent one.
>
> Hetherington had a Siamese cat named Chester, who had been sired by a Siamese named Willard. Fearing that colleagues might recognize his pet's name, he thought it better to use the pet's initial. Aware that most Americans have at least two given names, he invented two more given names based on the scientific name for a house cat, Felis domesticus, and abbreviated them accordingly as F. D. C. His article, entitled "Two-, Three-, and Four-Atom Exchange Effects in bcc ³He" and written by J. H. Hetherington and F. D. C. Willard, was accepted by the Physical Review and published in number 35 (November 1975).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._D._C._Willard
Seonachan said,
December 9, 2025 @ 9:52 am
I am reminded of the story – I hope not apocryphal – of the priest who had learned Cree, which has separate inclusive and exclusive first person plural forms. He stood at the altar with several other priests behind him and declared "We are all sinners." But he used the exclusive form, much to the delight of the congregants.
Coby said,
December 9, 2025 @ 11:03 am
The same argument can be made against any word with more than one possible interpretation, as most words are; the meaning, as always, depends on the context.
I don't see how referring to (not even quoting) a bunch of European philosophers strengthens the argument.
Stephen Goranson said,
December 9, 2025 @ 1:22 pm
As is available in the links, even though not only fictional but fictional from an extra remove, yet recognizable:
Tonto: what do you mean we, kemosabe?
AntC said,
December 9, 2025 @ 2:41 pm
We (novel)
I find it quite a useful pointer, particularly if it appears in the article's title in the form of a question: "Why do we all love …?" It means I don't need to read further.
Brett D Altschul said,
December 9, 2025 @ 5:02 pm
@Philip Taylor, Peter McGoron: I don't know whether this was the case in 1975, but the style guides for the Physical Review journals more recently has (or had; I can't seem to find it now) notes on the use of "we" in single author papers. The plural was not to be used to give a suggestion of greater agreement or authority; however, it could be used to politely include the reader, as in constructions like, "We can see from this figure that…."
Michael Vnuk said,
December 9, 2025 @ 5:36 pm
Some of the uses of 'we' being discussed are not a problem to me, such as 'we' in maths papers, which seems to be just a tradition, and 'we' in 'we need to ban something', which appears to be more focused on the removal rather than on the remover.
It is the examples at the beginning of the quoted material that are more problematic. I call this use of 'we' the 'assertive we', because the 'we' is making an all-encompassing assertion. (Sometimes, the 'we' is disguised as 'everybody' or 'everyone' or 'all of us'.) If I can easily think of counter-examples, especially when one of the counter-examples is me, then the strength of we' is immediately diminished. It is then not 'Everyone is talking about A' [I had X but I don't want to mention that product] but more likely 'Many people are talking about A' or 'A lot of people I know are talking about A' or 'Some people I know who I have talked to about X have expressed an opinion similar to mine'.
David Marjanović said,
December 10, 2025 @ 10:01 am
This varies between languages and disciplines. In my field, in English, single authors have no qualms about using "I" (myself included).
To me that's a really strange wording. I expect it in teaching, in an actual course, but not in a paper.
VVOV said,
December 10, 2025 @ 11:12 am
I watched a short TikTok style video today where a woman complains about the use of AI generated images in a fashion magazine. At one point she says something along the lines of “Why are we using AI generated images to depict women’s bodies?”
This “we” is notably exclusive of both the listener (who is presumed to agree with the speaker) AND the speaker (who isn’t the one using the AI generated images) as individuals. It presumably references something like “our society”, one that the speaker is part of, but under duress.
I think this type of generic “we” is interestingly distinct from the more traditional “editorial we” like “we should ban guns in schools” etc., in which the “we” does include the speaker’s view.
Haamu said,
December 16, 2025 @ 1:27 am
I'm confused by the reference to "zero anaphora" here:
Maybe it's because (appropriately) I don't understand the referent of "this." But assuming "this" = the topic of the main post, then my confusion is as follows:
Zero anaphora is where the pronoun is missing, correct? But that's not what we're actually talking about here. Here, the pronoun ("we") is present, but it's the referent that is missing or vague. We need a different term. (I gather that "vague referent" is a term that's actually used, but that's no fun.)
Let's get our Greek dictionaries out. It's an old game. We already have anaphoric, cataphoric, exophoric, endophoric, homophoric, metaphoric, and so on. But we don't have the words we actually need to address this concern. So let's be more precise.
As people note, we can't really be "Against We." "We" is too useful. It connects. It exhorts. I (as you may have noticed) really like "we." So instead, let's be:
Against nephelophoric We (where the referent is vague);
Against apeirophoric We (where the referent is unbounded, i.e., "we" is lazily meant to include everyone — ok, maybe this is a favorite vice of mine);
Against atelophoric (?) We (where the referent is unfinished, i.e., isn't fully formed in the speaker's mind);
Against kenophoric We (where the referent is empty — this might be a general term for the whole category of objectionable usages, or it might specifically refer to the tool of the classical Frankfurtian bullshitter);
and definitely
Against pseudophoric We (where the speaker wants us to believe there's a referent but there actually isn't one). Note that Trump is the master of this, not to mention the well-known pseudophoric They, as in, "They say …," which is merely kenophoric when most people say it but frequently definitely pseudophoric coming from Trump).
Maybe I'm being frivolous, but there's a larger point. Against We may be a nebulous complaint, but it's an intuition we should pay attention to. Something is validly bothering us. All we really need is a precise conceptual framework around reference, and a vocabulary to express it. (If this has truly already been done, feel free to fill me in.)
More to the point: there are plenty of categories of We to be against. But we should also be able to see the types of We we should be for: for ethelophoric We, for koinophoric We, for a start.
Philip Taylor said,
December 16, 2025 @ 5:14 am
Wonderful, Haamu, truly wonderful, although personally I have far more problem with "they" [*] than I do with "we". Now could I possibly trouble you to gloss "ethelophoric" and "koinophoric", please, for those of us whose recognition of Greek etymons is not as as well developed as yours ?
——–
[*] e.g., recent BBC coverage of the "double-jeopardy" conviction of a man after an interval of seven years on the basis of the newly-adduced evidence of the man's child. There was no suggestion whatsoever that the child was non-binary or trans-gender, yet was consistently referred to as "they" when "he" or "she" would have been far more natural and idiomatic.
Haamu said,
December 17, 2025 @ 2:47 pm
Thanks, Philip.
I admit I'm on thin ice (particularly in this forum) since I don't know Classical Greek (a project I've scheduled for whenever I fully retire in a few years) and am forced to fumble around with free resources like Wiktionary and a few other sites. So I may be making mistakes or suboptimal choices here that others can improve on.
I mentioned two positive purposes for "we": it connects, and it exhorts. That's what I'm going for with these two coinages:
Koinophoric is from κοινός (koinós, “common, shared”). This is the (or one form of the) connective we. The referent is the group of people who find themselves in community with, or find that they share something important with, the speaker.
Ethelophoric is from ἐθέλω (ethélō, "to be willing, to wish"). This is the exhortative we. The referent is the group of people who make a decision to join the speaker.
I propose that the classic ethelophoric we is from Henry V, the St. Crispin's Day speech:
which could easily be taken for a simple inclusive we, except that Henry immediately makes clear who is included in the group:
It seems pretty clear that this we doesn't simply include his entire audience. It excludes anybody within earshot who doesn't join him in this decision, and it includes anybody out of earshot who does join him.
(I'm undecided on whether ἐθέλω is the best choice here, since I want to suggest strong volition, and several dictionaries say there are stronger options, but I'm not sure I like the resulting coinages.)
One thing that koinophoric we and ethelophoric we have in common, and that sets them apart from some of the objectionable uses people are complaining about, is that the referent is not vague or weaselly. Membership in the referent group is clear even if it is not static — these groups are organic, as is appropriate for a group of humans — because it is defined by rule. The rule should either be directly stated, as Henry does, or it should be clear from context.