How do you express yourself on your blog, when you know you’re not the only one thinking what you’re going to express? I am posting on my blog, but “my” ideas are obviously part of a larger collective mind. But if I say we think, I’m rallying people under my banner without their consent. I might use the word community. What community? Whose community? Who am I to talk in its name?
I’m not sure my blog is mine even if it doesn’t support comments yet (hey, it’s only beta!) The opinions I’ll post will be influenced by other people and most often supported by links to other sites. So the idea of me as an island doesn’t hold water (I’m so smart..) since I’m mostly relaying the memes floating around (see, I did it again.)
I could use “you” in its indefinite usage (no, I didn’t mean I wanted to use you, but now that you suggest it), just like I started this post (which is starting to getting nowhere.) In French we have the word “on” (not pronounced as the English on), an indefinite form that isn’t either you, we, or them. We’re used to saying “on est un con”. Now how do I explain that? It means the indefinite form is stupid, and it suggests the person that used it is too, for having used it (but you’re just hinting, since you didn’t use the second person and addressed no one specifically.)
There’s also “one” as in, “one would think people would know when to kill a post that is going nowhere”, but it sounds so BBC English to me. And I guess one is a moron (as close to “on est un con” a translation as I can think of.)
So we’re back to the beginning. I’ll carry on posting in the first person, acknowledging I’m part of a community of thought, but not speaking in its name since it didn’t ask me anything in the first place (I’m bad at dictatorship, really.) But then people might think I’m posing as a hotshot pundit… Whereas we is less aggressive. But it could sound like a manifesto too much aware of itself…
GoTo Line 1 (the joy of recursive arguments written in BASIC is that they have a better chance to break.)
(current obsessions meta data: unique thoughts don’t exist, duplication sucks, always backup a point with a link to show you know you’re actually not saying anything new, I suck at English and it’s not getting any better)