Gather 'round kids, we caught a blogger.

Ben Zimmer, in a New York Times Magazine column titled “The perils of a presumptuous pronoun,” examines the long history of distaste for the first-person plural or “Royal We.” The article opens with some variations of the apocryphal Mark Twain witticism: “There are three classes of people who always say “we” instead of “I.” They are emperors, editors and men with a tapeworm.” Zimmer continues:

What is it about the presumptuous use of we that inspires so much outrage, facetious or otherwise? The roots of these adverse reactions lie in the haughtiness of the majestic plural, or royal we, shared by languages of Western Europe since the days of ancient Roman emperors…

Nameless authors of editorials may find the pronoun we handy for representing the voice of collective wisdom, but their word choice opens them up to charges of gutlessness and self-importance. 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.”

Some of us here at MobyLives are guilty of using “we” in our blogposts, and so Zimmer‘s article gave us pause. Are we gutless? Imperial? Deserving of whippings?

There’s a more innocent explanation. Melville House (and MobyLives) is an indie operation. Employees shout across the office to ask each other questions and the entire staff can sit around a single table. When a shocking/funny/bizarre piece of literary news pops up, we talk about it together. So when we write “we,” we use the term for the same reason a band or gang might use it: because we’re in this together.