The Wall Street Journal ran a book review in its August 22-23, 2026 issue. Kyle Harper authored the review, which discussed a book by Emma Southon, Not Built In A Day: How Slavery Made The Roman Empire.
Here's a quote from Harper's book review that drew my immediate attention (the fact that this is the first paragraph of Harper's review made this comment pretty hard to miss):
In 1779 Edward Gibbon was compelled to respond to critics who alleged that his “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” was unduly irreverent. Self-defense, the historian wrote, naturally required “the perpetual repetition” of what he called “the vainest and most disgusting of the pronouns”: the first-person singular. In the 20th century, the Oxford classicist Ronald Syme referred to this as “the odious pronoun.” Not too many years ago, a doctoral student in history gave a lecture. His thesis adviser delicately observed that the student had used the odious pronoun. Reader, the subject of the lecture is long forgotten, but the observation stung.
I had never before heard the first-person singular pronoun called "the most odious pronoun," but there is a lesson there, and it's a lesson worth learning. Attributing things to "I" is, very often, quite offensive, because it's a distortion of the main truth of our social and economic life. It is not the "I" that makes history happen, it's the "We."
The Martin O'Malley quotation, featured above, was obtained from my Facebook feed, and O'Malley properly identifies the main lesson of an effective politics. His phrase has figured, not infrequently, in my daily blog postings:
We're All In This Together
So, not forgetting, ever, how important and consequential we each are, and can be, let's try to favor the first-person plural pronoun as we contemplate how we can best forge a future worth having (note the "we").
Image Credit:
https://www.facebook.com/MartinOMalley
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