What Do You Mean, ‘We’?

I’m finally following up on a suggestion made some months back by Frank Williams at Eastern Kentucky University, to investigate the proliferation of the first-person plural in what appear to be dubious circumstances. He writes, “Decades ago I was taught not to use the first-person pronoun in serious writing, but instead to use the editorial ‘we,’ meaning ‘me’ (or maybe ‘I’), and I’ve seen the variety of ‘we’s’ that are explained on the Web. However in recent years I’ve seen what appears to be a different usage: ‘we’ meaning a small proportion of the general population (tho’ perhaps numerically large) but probably not including the author.” As an example, Williams cites David Ropeik, author of How Risky Is It, Really? Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts,” writing in The New York Times that “we have excessive fear of vaccines”—a fear that the author himself may not…

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