{"id":17067,"date":"2018-03-01T09:11:06","date_gmt":"2018-03-01T17:11:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/?p=17067"},"modified":"2018-02-17T19:19:13","modified_gmt":"2018-02-18T03:19:13","slug":"nosism-and-the-majestic-plural","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2018\/03\/01\/nosism-and-the-majestic-plural\/","title":{"rendered":"nosism and the majestic plural"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>We have long been familiar with the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Royal_we\">royal <i>we<\/i><\/a> and the editorial <i>we<\/i>, the use of plural pronouns to refer to a singular personage. But we had not heretofore been aware that the royal <i>we<\/i> is also known as the <i>majestic plural<\/i>, nor had we known that the majestic plural, the editorial <i>we<\/i>, and the author\u2019s <i>we<\/i> (<i>pluralis modestiae<\/i>) are all instances of the phenomenon known as <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Nosism\">nosism<\/a>, from the Latin <i>nos<\/i>, meaning <i>we<\/i>.<\/p>\r\n<p>(The <cite>Shorter Oxford English Dictionary<\/cite> provides an additional alternative definition for <i>nosism<\/i>: \u201cA selfish attitude in a group of people, corresponding to egotism in an individual.\u201d However, we disdain to recognize that definition, preferring the using-plural-pronouns-for-individuals definition given above.)<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-to-me-words"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17067"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17067\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17071,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17067\/revisions\/17071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}