The perpendicular pronoun
From a
review
on amazon.com:
I'm very much of two minds about this
book. There's little need to offer further comment on:
1. The author's ego (in one paragraph on page 59, he uses the
perpendicular pronoun 7 times; the possessive first person another 5)
...
This somewhat cutesy way of referring to the pronoun
I (which in its spelling is nothing but a line
perpendicular to the line of text) was new to Elizabeth Daingerfield
Zwicky (who reported it to me) and to me, but it's fairly well
represented on the web (1,590 raw hits just now). Perhaps it's a
way of avoiding actually
USING the pronoun, which gets
a bad press in a lot of advice to writers.
On the web you can find a
2003
column "The Perpendicular Pronoun" by Maureen Dowd, contrasting
Bush 41's avoidance of this pronoun -- according to Dowd, he often
omits the subject
I entirely,
sometimes uses an inclusive
we
(though just how much "modesty and self-effacement" -- Dowd's words --
this shows is debatable) -- with Bush 43's bold use of it.
Twenty years before this (on 11/25/82) we find the expression in an
episode of Yes Minister, in the mouth of a
stunningly circumlocutory character:
Sir Humphrey: "Minister, I think there
is something you perhaps ought to know."
Jim Hacker: "Yes Humphrey?"
Sir Humphrey: "The identity of the Official whose alleged
responsibility for this hypothetical oversight has been the subject of
recent discussion, is NOT shrouded in quite such impenetrable obscurity
as certain previous disclosures may have led you to assume, but not to
put too fine a point on it, the individual in question is, it may
surprise you to learn, one whom you [sic] present interlocutor is in
the habit of defining by means of the perpendicular pronoun."
Jim Hacker: "I beg your pardon?"
Sir Humphrey: "It was...I."
(This quotation is used in the
Wikipedia page
on logorrhoea (or verbal diarrhea) to illustrate the phenomenon.)
And you can find plenty of badmouthing of
I, as
on the blog
Daily Diatribe (written by an Australian):
One of the difficulties of writing
about personal experiences and thoughts is the perpendicular pronoun: "I".
Allan Moult, the editor who guided my early writing efforts [note
missing comma] was quite fierce about eliminating every possible
occurrence of the perpendicular pronoun [many style manuals would
require a comma here too] and my gratitude to him on this account is
immense. On the other hand, it can be quite difficult to achieve. One
way out of the difficulty is to invent an alter ego, hence The Pompous Git.
The idea that
I (also
me) is immodest has a long history,
but many writers on usage regard avoiding the pronoun as false modesty
(or, in Bill Safire's phrasing in
No
Uncertain Terms, p. 183, "phony humility"), especially since the
strategies of avoidance --
the author,
the present writer,
yours
truly,
myself (which Safire calls
the "horizontal pronoun", in contrast to the perpendicular pronoun),
recasting in the passive, etc. -- mostly offend writers like Safire and
Bryan Garner (see his article on
FIRST PERSON in
GMAU, p. 349) much more than
straightforward
I and
me would, especially in writing
about personal experiences or opinions. And in this case I agree
with them.
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at November 1, 2007 07:16 PM