Twitter
Email
RSSIndividual or Person?
Clayton Doak objects to the indiscriminate use of the word individual where person will do. Ex.
This individual was charged with criminal trespass.
The word individual comes from a Latin word meaning “indivisible.” Synonyms for its use as an adjective include single, separate, discrete, independent, sole, lone, solitary, and isolated.
The colloquial sense of individual to mean “person” was in use as early as 1742.
The Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus gives the following synonyms for individual as a noun: person, human being, mortal, soul, creature; man, boy, woman, girl; character, personage.
However, one of the contributors to the OAWT, David Foster Wallace, has this to say about using individual as a synonym for person:
As a noun, this word has one legitimate use, which is to distinguish a single person from some larger group. . . . It is not a synonym for person despite the fact that much legal, bureaucratic, and public-statement prose uses it that way . . . OAWT, p 464
Wallace deplores the substitution of individual for person and an individual for someone. He lumps this use of individual with other “pretentious, deadening puff-words” and urges us to eschew them.
Got Your Free eBook?
- Subscribe to Daily Writing Tips and you will be able to download our free ebook: Basic English Grammar.
- You will also get all our grammar, spelling, punctuation and writing tips.
- The download link will go along with the first email (you might need to wait up to 24 hours).
Subscribe
2 Responses to “Individual or Person?”
Got something to say?
Sponsors
Recent Articles
- Using “May” in a Question
- Albatross and Alcatraz Island
- The Discount Is Back: Buy Our Book Today for $9.99
- Participles and Perfect Verb Tenses
- Writing Clinic #3: The Trip
- Do You Write Like Stephen King?
- Repudiate, Refute, and Reject
- Ingenious vs. Ingenuous
- “Sleazy” and “slazy”
- “Fun, Funner, Funnest”?
- Overwhelm and Underwhelm
- Spasmodic
- Learn the Forms of “drink,” Please!
- Bunting and Bunting
- Hyper and Hypo
I, too, have often wondered about this. There’s a place for the word “individual”, but often “person” or “someone” works better. The use of individual at times feels stuffy and disconnected, which is okay if that is the emotion the writer wants to convey. But, usually, it’s not.
good information, thanks