About thirteen years ago, I was standing in line outside a student party when the boy in front of me said he’d heard feces being thrown inside. I immediately suspected that it was nonsense, which it later turned out to be, but the girl next to me reacted seriously. „I I don’t think it’s normal when people throw poop.”
I thought it was strange how she said that, with the emphasis on the first person singular. As if it were an extremely personal and subjective judgment – she thought throwing poop was not normal – instead of a view that you can assume is generally shared. She turned something clearly universal into something particular. It annoyed me.
Later I developed a similar annoyance with the opposite phenomenon, when the second person singular is used incorrectly. Remarkably often I hear people use a universal ‘you’ form, when in fact they want to express something of their private ‘I’. In television programs such as Farmer seeks wife and On the way to love For example, participants in those short interviews between companies say things like this all the time: “When you see Harm in his overalls, your heart starts beating a little faster.” Or: “With Karlijn you feel that pleasant click, but you also want someone who can wakeboard a bit.”
No! I shout in my head at such a ‘you’ sayer. Your heart pounds for Harm in his overalls. You wants someone who can wakeboard. Not me. Leave me out of it.
People who have had something bad happen to them also often speak in the second person singular. About the moment a serious illness was discovered in them: ‘the ground drops from under your feet’. About a love deception done to them: ‘Your world is collapsing’.
When it comes to these kinds of heavy matters, I usually understand an appeal to the universal ‘you’. Such language can also serve a function. Firstly, it places the misery a little further away from the person telling about it. “My world collapsed” may be too painful for the deceived to say; by speaking instead of ‘your world’ he safely covers his own specific injury with a veil of generality.
This is related to a second function of the general ‘you’: the speaker suggests that his experience applies to more people, or that it would at least also apply to others if they were in a similar situation. The sick person who declares that ‘the ground is sinking from under your feet’ is actually saying: if what is happening to me now happened to you, the earth would also disappear from under the soles of your feet. In this way, the second person singular functions as an invitation to the listener to sympathize with the speaker.
I came across a masterful use of the universal ‘you’ some time ago in the Dutch translation of Les Annees (The years), by Annie Ernaux. In this ‘collective autobiography of our time’ the French writer looks back on her life from 1941 to 2006 without using the word ‘I’ once; her entire story is in the ‘men’, ‘we’, ‘they’ and ‘you’ forms.
Here the narrator uses the ‘you’ as old people do when talking about the past: “While you were sitting at the kitchen table doing your homework, the advertisements on Radio Luxembourg, just as much as the songs, evoked the certain happiness that the future would bring you.” Later: “The transistor radio made you happy in a way that had never existed before, happy that you were alone without being alone, that you could dispose of the noise and diversity of the world at will.”
I read it, and without ever having experienced what is described, I involuntarily think: oh yes, that is indeed what it was like then. For a moment the private feels universal. Still beautiful though. Find I than.
Josette Daemen is a political philosopher at the Institute of Public Administration at Leiden University.