This post is mostly intented for plural systems, but I’m open to anyone responding as well, even if you aren’t plural. It’s nice to hear from another perspective outside our community.
When you have more than one selves within the same body, it’s fair to say that the pronoun “I” may not be enough sometimes. After all, if you share your body with more than one selves, some of the things your body does would technically be done by all of your selves.
For example, as a plural system myself, whenever I go anywhere, technically all my headmates (or another selves) will also go with me since we share the same body. If the body goes somewhere, everyone goes along with it. With that, some stuff about us can’t be described with just “I.” Think of how I’ve been using “we,” “us,” and “our” throughout this post.
So, if you’re plural yourself, do you also use plural pronouns the same way we do? When do you use “we” to describe yourself? And when do you use “I” to describe yourself?
For me at least, I usually use singular pronouns for stuff like opinions, since every one of us have differing opinions (even if we share the same body!). For example, I am writing most of this text alone, so I use singular first person.
But, for stuff all of us agree on, stuff written by more than one headmates, or stuff involving multiple headmates, I often use plural pronouns like “we” since it involves more than one of us. I also use we for the more formal stuff. In a way, it’s kind of like using royal/formal we.
Honestly, being more than one in the same body presents a lot of weird and interesting quirks, and this is just one of them.
And, if you’re not plural or don’t understand what’s going on here (that’s understandable), how often do you use royal/formal we to describe yourself? If you’re the sole moderator of a community on lemmy or someplace else, do you use “we” for moderator announcements to sound more formal?
I only use ‘we’ when I also mean my cat.
Hi everyone! I unfortunately am not plural, so when I’m alone I’m all alone 😢 BUT! I try not to let that happen too often 😄
You asked if you’re not plural, how often do I use the royal/formal we, and I guess for me personally I would have to say not very often. I don’t use it to describe myself, only when I’m speaking on behalf of an organization, like if I get a technical question at work and I’m the most qualified to speak on how my company does things, that’s where I might say “that not how we usually do XYZ”. But for things specific to my single body, yeah I pretty much always use “I”.
I wasn’t too aware of the plural community before joining Lemmy and seeing lots of new communities, but I am enjoying learning about new people and topics I hadn’t heard of before! I don’t want to violate any rules, so if this is rude of me to ask please forgive me and ignore this question, but I see that there are many instances of a single body housing multiple identities, but is there the opposite? Is it ever the case where one identity is shared between two bodies? I guess I’m curious about the nature of the mind vs the physical world, and was wondering if there was any discussions on whether the identities were tied to the physical body, or if they were somehow external but just “linked” to a body.
Thanks everyone, I wish y’all the best!!
Overall we tend to use we more than I. I gets used when someone is expressing their own opinion, when in non-plural spaces online, sometimes when talking to people we aren’t out to, and sometimes when only one of us is up front and no one else is close to front.
Certainly very similar to how we do it.
It only becomes a problem when I slipped up using plural pronouns while talking to people who don’t know we’re plural.
I almost exclusively use ‘I’ instead of ‘we’ most of the time since I’m the on doing the talk and women that I share my body with does not like to use social media. But will use ‘We’ when it’s both something we’re agreed with or share the same opinions.
If we need to talk about ourselves separately we just use our name instead of ‘I’ and just use ‘I’ only for someone who doesn’t know that she share her brain cell with me lol
I almost exclusively use ‘I’ instead of ‘we’ most of the time since I’m the on(e) doing the talk and women that I share my body with does not like to use social media. But will use ‘We’ when it’s both something we’re agreed with or share the same opinions.
Kinda reminds me of how our system do it, but only for opinions. On the internet, it’s easy to use ‘I’ as we rarely front together while making posts.
But the weird thing is, is how many times I ‘accidentally’ switch to ‘we’ when writing. It almost always happens in a certain situations. I automatically switch to ‘we’ when describing stuff that isn’t an opinion and applies to all of us in the physical world. For example, when describing our body.
But it’s amazing how quick and normal the switch is, almost as if I know intuitively when to use ‘I’ and when to use ‘we’. But it does become a problem every once in a blue moon when I accidentally use ‘we’ while talking to people who don’t know we’re plural.
This is a screenshot of the chat between my wife and I where I searched for the term “Wir lieben dich” (we love you), which yields 879 results over the course of many years.
I have a rule to always use “I” instead of “we” anywhere in public, though. I don’t want to attract attention and I don’t want to tell everybody everytime, like many others seem to do.
To be honest, we rarely use “we” in public either, outside of plural-friendly spaces like this community and other similar ones on another site, even then it’s mostly online. But internally, we use ‘we’ a lot when talking between headmates, which makes sense.
Pearl: Anyone we intend to socialize with? We kind of hit over the head with the plurality with all the subtlety of a jackhammer. So we use ‘we’ all the time.
Interesting. So you never use ‘I’, even when talking to someone who may not be familiar with plurality? Have that ever caused a problem to you?
Cat: Not really. Most folk seem to automatically censor it out with their weirdness filter.
I use the royal we more often than I like.
We rarely use we to refer to being plural even in plural friendly spaces.
