The distinction between the 1st, 2nd and 3rd persons would seem to be one that is rock-hard and practically universal. However, in practice, there is a surprising degree of fluidity between them and the pronouns and verb endings used to express them tend to shift wildly over time.

I was reminded of this by various pronouncements by Donald Trump following the formal announcement of his candidature for the Republican Party nomination for US president. Trump is one of a small number of individuals who routinely refers to himself in the third person.

It is easy to explain this away in terms of egotism and a heightened sense of self-importance. But there must be more to it than this. Many people are egotistic and have an inflated opinion of themselves—most use the word I a lot—but few resort to this peculiar rhetorical device.

There is something regal about referring to oneself as a third person; a sense of certainty that one’s place in history is guaranteed—an entitlement that only hereditary monarchs rightly or not enjoy. But even kings and queens tend to avoid this use. The queen of England prefers the famous royal ‘we’ or ‘one;’ Louis XIV said l’état c’est moi. I is still king.

Julius Caesar, the man who gave his proper name to emperors, Kaisers and Tsars, in his lengthy report on his military campaign in Gaul refers to himself throughout in the third person. This may merely be a rhetorical device to claim objectivity for a highly propagandist account. But there may be something else going on here too.

During his campaign in Gaul, Caesar was not a dictator, emperor or king. Indeed aspiring to be either of the latter would have been treasonable and extremely dangerous and irresponsible in the republican Roman ‘Empire’ of the time. And yet, by persistent use of the third person, Caesar both casts himself as a figure of unshakeable world-historical proportions and distances himself from charges that he is assuming this role for reason of sheer selfish self-promotion.

There is a certain self-doubt and detachment of public from private persona in this. An appearance of presumptuous self-confidence is undermined by its opposite.

There is a scene in Oliver Stone’s Nixon in which the embattled president mired in the Watergate scandal, played admirably by Anthony Hopkins, is frantically going through transcripts of his tapes redacting with a black marker pen expletives and racial slurs that, as he puts it, “I said, but Nixon can’t say.” The whole film is a Shakespearean-style disquisition on the tragic political psychology of a carefully crafted public persona of supreme self-confidence undermined by the personal weaknesses on which it is founded. The shift from first to third person aptly expresses the shiftiness of the underlying personality.

An almost opposite phenomenon is described with especial perspicuity by Tom Wolfe in Chapter 23 of The Bonfire of the Vanities. A previously anonymous—albeit extremely wealthy and powerful—banker is thrust into the media spotlight when he kills a young black man in a hit-and-run automobile accident. Wolfe beautifully and abstractly describes the very modern feeling of ‘being turned inside out’, his sense of private self ebbing irrevocably away into the third person of the public sphere. As Wolfe’s anti-hero is processed through the prison system and attracts increasing media attention, he at once becomes more reified and yet is more keenly aware of himself as a physical individual, stripped of the trappings of bourgeois dignity, rather than a privileged member of a protected tribe.

The detachment of public and private personae marked by a shift from first to third person and back again is relatively rare and usually a sign that the individual is at once uncomfortable in and yet fatally attached to their public role. It is a discursive phenomenon that almost never occurs in ‘real’ everyday life. The closest situation I can imagine in ‘normal’ discourse would be that of a manager firing an employee, saying “Personally, I would like to keep you on; but as a businessmen, I must let you go;” but this is not really the same phenomenon, since the distinction between the subjective individual and the role is here made clear, necessitating the use of the preposition ‘as’. Where you sit is where you stand, but it needn’t change how you see yourself.

There is, however, a growing tendency in everyday discourse to shift, even within a single sentence, from first to second person. This is one of those linguistic quirks that, when I first noticed it, struck me as being especially odd and I initially dismissed it as a result of arbitrary linguistic slippage, sloppiness, absent-mindedness or failure of forethought under stress. However, I have now heard it so many times, even in the public discourse of individuals—President Obama, for example—who are obviously experts at measuring the potential impact of words as they speak, that it cannot be so easily explained away.

On the one hand, this can be understood as an attempt on the part of an already powerful individual not to dwell in an unseemly fashion on his or her personal prowess—a forgivable false modesty that exploits the ongoing shift of ‘you’ from strict second person addressee to an indefinite pronoun indicating anyone or everyone. When Obama switches deftly from “I” to “you” he is carefully casting himself not a as a world historical figure or a narcissist, but as an ordinary guy: “I am one of you”.

But I have heard cases where this is clearly not a carefully crafted political ploy but simply a new habit of speech. It seems to be an especially prominent feature of the discourse of ordinary people thrust before a camera and a microphone after suffering some kind of personal tragedy. They begin with “I” but almost always end with ‘you,’ although there is no obvious shift in reference towards a higher degree of generalization.

Why would people do this? One explanation would be that those recounting personal misfortunes derive some comfort from generalizing and thereby sharing and dissipating their negative experience. “I was raped. You feel helpless.” At once an appeal for sympathy and a self-effacing shrug. “We” here, although objectively more accurate, would appear too feistily feminist; “it” too cold; “I” too self-pitying.

But there is something discomfiting about this explanation, which would seem to ascribe too much conscious manipulation of discourse to those in extremity. Neither does it explain why people are increasingly using the same discursive shift even in the most banal of situations.

The trend poses an intriguing counterpoint to that which I have observed elsewhere with regard to the possessive pronoun.

It is important to remember that pronouns are always directional and may differ subtly or drastically depending on which way they are pointed. Me saying ‘you’ does not necessarily mean the same as you saying ‘you’.

Traditional conjugations invariably put the ego in a privileged position at the top of the list. I look down on you and we both look down on him her or it and especially ‘them’, which is almost always relegated to the bottom of the hierarchical pile.

In a more progressive society in which the exercise and enjoyment of personal power is universally frowned upon, the I shifts from tyrant to subject. My authority morphs into your leader, whom you must address as such. As a result, use of the second person pronoun or an impersonal pronoun has increased in recent years.

Second person singular pronouns are especially fluid. Many societies distinguish between a ‘tu’ form for use among supposed equals and a ‘vous’ form for addressing supposed superiors (to use, only for the sake of convenience, the French terminology). But practice and rapid change over time reveals astonishing levels of ambiguity and fluidity. Genuflecting “vossa mercê” in Brazilian Portuguese has long since given way to more casual but still respectful “você,” and, much to the chagrin of some socially conservative purists, to a clipped convenient “Cê”. Nevertheless, in counter-opposition to this democratizing trend, the use of the clearly slavish ‘o senhor/a senhora’ as a mark of inferiority/respect is still widespread in Brazil. “Tu” in Brazil occupies a peculiar position: used by parents, children, siblings and lovers in everyday discourse, but replaced by você in most other relaxed power relations and yet still the standard form of the second person singular in general in Biblical and literary discourse. As one Brazilian poet once put it to me, “you can use você in a love song, but not in a love poem.”

English is apparently simpler. Informal yet formal ‘thou’ has almost entirely fallen out of use, although it still persists in Biblical language and the folk memory of faux archaic poetry and fixed phrases such as “holier than thou”. “You’, originally the accusative plural, has come to be the dominant form. Uncomfortable with this democratic trend, some English-speaking cultures, such as that of Texas, have evolved a “y’all” form, not, interestingly, to re-introduce an apparently obvious and necessary binary distinction between singular and plural (as with Liverpudlian ‘youse’) but to distinguish an aggressive accusatory ‘you’ (Your country needs you. I’m gonna shoot you) from a more affable, respectful, diner-friendly ‘y’all’.

You is all about variations of respect and it is thus unsurprising that, in a more democratic massified rational society, it should be co-opted to refer to everyone, replacing the increasingly pompous- and dismissive-sounding indefinite pronoun ‘one’ and then to identify one’s own personal feelings and experiences with those of the community as a whole.

What happened then with ‘we’? Many modern languages tend to replace the traditional first person plural with a more neutral form: “on” in French, “a gente” in Brazilian Portuguese, “you” in English. In 1981, victorious socialist supporters chanted “on a gagné”, while the Front National slogan was “Nous, nous les déporterons”. A vague ‘on’, ‘a gente’, ‘you’ is clearly more inclusive than a hysterically repeated “we” juxtaposed with “they” in a clear expression of exclusion.

“We” is problematical because, in most Indo-European languages, there is no distinction between the exclusive and the inclusive forms, and much leeway as to where the speaker intends and the listener understand the line between excluded and included to lie. A once politically powerful pronoun (We shall overcome), it is now one that politicians and the people in the street who imitate them prefer to eschew. “You” makes you seem tolerant and objective; “I” taints you with selfishness and egoism; ‘we’ is worse still, suggesting that you identify with a tribally exclusive group.