Re: Indefinite pronouns [was:Re: realloc() - frequency, conditions, or experiences about relocation?]

Anton Shepelev <anton.txt@gmail.moc> writes:

Cross-posting to alt.english.usage .
>
Tim Rentsch to Anton Shepelev:
>

I think it is a modern English idiom, which I dislike as
well.  StackOverflow is full of questions starting like:
"How do you do this?" and "How do I do that?"  They are
informal ways of the more literary "How does one do
this?"  or "What is the way to do that?"

>
I have a different take here.  First the "your" of "your
strategy" reads as a definite pronoun, meaning it refers
specifically to Ben and not to some unknown other party.

>
And I am /sure/ it is intended in the general (indefinite)
sense,

I don't know why you think that.  I don't know any native
English speakers who would read it as other than referring
to the person being responded to (who was Ben in this case).
Responding to Malcolm's statement, Ben said "It's odd to
call it mine", so it seems Ben also read it as a definite
pronoun, referring to himself.

As for the rest of your comments, you're reaching bad
conclusions because you're not looking in the right places.
To investigate the meaning and usage of words and phrases,
the best first place to look is always a dictionary.  In
the process of writing my earlier response, I consulted
roughly half a dozen different online dictionaries, reading
definitions for 'one', 'you', 'they', 'indefinite pronoun',
'definite pronoun', and probably some other terms.  I also
looked at non-dictionary sources if they looked relevant,
but my starting point was dictionaries.  Oh, I also looked
up both 'idiom' and 'idiomatic' (which even though they are
related don't mean the same thing).

Incidentally, on the three pages you gave links for,
all of them had at least one example that used "you"
as an indefinite pronoun.

One point I want to clear up.  A couple of times you
characterize the indefinite pronoun usage of "you"
as "modern".  It is not in any sense modern.  I am
a native speaker of English, speaking and reading
the language for well over 60 years.  Furthermore I
was raised by a grammarian.  In all of that time and
experience there was never any hint that "you" as an
indefinite pronoun was new or unusual or considered
substandard or slang or unacceptable.  It is simply
standard usage, and has been for longer than my
lifetime.

But "one" can also be used as a first person definite
pronoun (referring to the speaker), which an online
reference tells me is chiefly British English.

>
I had no idea it could, nor does Wikipedia.  Can you share
an example of a definite first-person `one'?

(A) Pick a good search engine (I use duckduckgo.com).
(B) Search for the two words  one definition.
(C) Read the entries for every online dictionary that
is found, or at least the top five or six.

You should find a couple of examples.  It was by going
through this process myself that I discovered "one"
is sometimes used as a first person definite pronoun.