While describing a train ride, I said We stopped at Coliseum station, and a bunch of
Raiders fans boarded.
Only a sentence or two later did I think: what we?
Mathematicians use we
when writing proofs, even if the proof is not joint work.
Supposedly the we
in this case refers to the reader who will carefully follow the
author's arguments; but I doubt many mathematicians deliberately choose we,
any more than we deliberately choose the imperative voice when we write
let n be an integer
or suppose not.
For good or ill, proofs
are conventionally written in a particular style, and we
is part of the style.
But I formed the we
habit long before I started writing proofs. When Mom asked
what I'd done during a day of elementary school, I would say we ate lunch; and we had
recess...
Everyone else in the class was doing the same thing as me, at the same time,
sometimes even in cooperation with me. And so I said we.
And now? I stare into space; I went for a walk this evening. But if
there is any hint that someone else might be staring into space at the same time, or going
for a walk in the same direction, I'll revert to we.
If this seems like a lot of hot wind for a two-letter pronoun, consider the following line from an e-mail I sent during a coffee break this afternoon:
Hack hack hack. Boing boing. Hack. Boing. Um.
The response? Dude.
Which is another very interesting word...