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In English grammar, generic you or indefinite you is the use of the pronoun you to refer to an unspecified person. Generic one is the use of one in the same way.

In casual English, the second person pronoun you often takes on the additional role of a generic pronoun. The pronoun one can serve this function as well, but is rarely seen outside the most formal styles; the Oxford English Dictionary states that the use of this word as a pronoun in English "may have been influenced" by French on, which is not a number, but a descendant of Latin homo, "human being, person". One's most common use is to represent the sense "I and other people", as in Jane Austen's:

I do not think him so very ill-looking as I did — at least one sees many worse.

— Mansfield Park (1814)

In some works of fiction, especially those written in second-person narrative, generic one is used to contrast with the you who refers to the narrating character specifically:

As long as one is at one's desk by ten-thirty, one is relatively safe. Somehow you manage to miss this banker's deadline at least once a week.

— Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

Even in other formal situations, generic one is much less common than generic you when giving instructions, as it seems especially remote and stuffy. The possessive is especially awkward: One always should wash one's hands. In more idiomatic speech, this would be rendered as You should always wash your hands. The imperfect domestication of generic one has caused respected writers to lose track of grammatical agreement, producing constructions such as one … they:

… in a nasty Scottish jail, where one cannot even get the dirt brushed off their clothes.

— Sir Walter Scott

one … he:

And one must be careful not to shoot himself.

— Stuart Chase, in The Tyranny of Words

and one … you:

When one is very old, as I am … your legs give in before your head does.

— George Bernard Shaw

Generic you, by contrast, creates no such difficulties. Other circumlocutions are resorted to in English to avoid the awkwardness of generic one, such as resort to the passive voice. The idiomatic English translation of the French sentence Ici on parle français, literally, "here one speaks French" or "here someone speaks French", is "French is spoken here". Spanish, Portuguese and some other Romance languages resort to a reflexive verb in this context: se habla español/fala-se português, literally "Spanish/Portuguese speaks itself" but meaning "Spanish/Portuguese is spoken". Since the more recent traditions of linguistic prescription and usage commentary in English also discourage the passive voice, this too may draw criticism.

The phenomenon of generic you, though decried in the works of some still-read prescriptivist grammarians, is so widespread that it is nearly standard usage. The writer and usage commentator E. B. White wrote that:

As for me, I try to avoid the impersonal one but have discovered that it is like a face you keep encountering in the streets and can't always avoid bowing to.

This is not the first case of a pronoun changing meaning, or acquiring an additional meaning, over time. The word you originally referred strictly to the second-person plural, being cognate with the German ihr and the French vous. When the second-person singular form thou was abandoned, you absorbed its functions.

Note that you can be ambiguous; it is not always obvious whether the generic you or a semantically second-person you is meant. For example, in "you never know what John is thinking about", you could as easily refer to the audience as to people in general. Sometimes stress and intonation can help convey the difference; for example, generic you is typically unstressed, whereas a stressed you usually refers to the audience.

Analogs in other languages

Second-person pronouns and structures are often used generically in other languages as well. In languages with more than one second-person pronoun—for example, due to a distinction between formal and informal pronouns (informal pronouns typically being used with family and close friends, and formal pronouns typically being used with social superiors and new acquaintances, though the line between these depends on the language; see T-V distinction), or due to a distinction between singular and plural or masculine and feminine—the rules for selecting a generic second-person pronoun may differ from the rules for selecting an ordinary second-person pronoun. Russian, for example, has a pronoun ты, used as an informal singular, and a pronoun Вы, used as a plural and as a formal singular; but only ты is used generically, such that ты may be used generically in the same sentence as a Вы being used as a literal second-person pronoun. Similarly, in Darja (Arabic as spoken in the Maghreb), there are two distinct singular second-person pronouns, one masculine (used when addressing a man) and one feminine (used when addressing a woman); but when used as generic pronouns, the speaker uses the pronoun with the gender corresponding to his or her own sex, rather than that of the person he or she is addressing.^[1]

On the other hand, in the place of where the generic you is used in English, diverse ways of expressing the same idea are used in a number of languages. German speakers, for example, use man as the generic pronoun, conjugated as third person. (Man darf einen Wagen kaufen./You may buy a car.) In Japanese, the sentence structure may make a patient of an action, or even an action itself, the topic of a sentence.

See also

• Disputed English grammar
• English personal pronouns
• Gender-neutral pronouns
• Generic antecedents
• One (pronoun)
• Singular they
• Y'all

References

1. ^ Souag, Lameen. Jabal al-Lughat: Impersonal vs. personal "you". Blog entry, posted 2007 September 9; accessed 2007 October 2.

• Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage (E. Ward Gilman, ed.) Merriam-Webster, 1993. ISBN 0-87779-132-5