A Dictionary of Cont..

personal 366
has to have a nanic for such appearances and
personal appearance has been chosen. It’s here to
stay and all the philologists in the world can’t
change it.
Personnel (a French word, coined to distinguish
the human element of the process of manufacture
from the materiel) first appeared in
English about a hundred years ago. In this
sense, it was a mass word and was always
treated as a singular. One might say a large personnel
or the personnel has been increased, but
not many personnel or three personnel have
been added.
However, personnel is used today as synonymous
with employees, and treated as a plural,
as in all personnel were asked to participate.
This use of the word as a plural is offensive to
some people, but it is now established in business,
sociology, and government and is not likely
to be dislodged.
personal friend is an attempt to recover the value
of friend which has been weakened, in general
democratic and commercial bonhomie, till it
means little more than acquaintance. None the
less, personal friend is a cliche and a redundancy.
personality; character. Personality has taken the
place in the twentieth century that character occupied
in the nineteenth. It is now used chiefly
to connote distinctive or notable personal character
(He has more personality than the other
oficers). It may also mean a person as an
assemblage of qualities (These capacities constitute
personality, for they imply consciousness
and thought). As a psychological term, personality
means all the constitutional, mental, emotional
and social characteristics of an individual,
an organized pattern of all such characteristics,
or a pattern of characteristics consisting of two
or more, usually opposing, types of behavior
(“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” is a classic story
about a split personality).
Nearer to the basic sense of the term is its
application to describe the quaIity of being a
person, personal identity (The age of Homer is
surrounded with darkness, his very personality
with doubt). It properly designates the essential
character of a person as distinguished from a
thing (Man has personality as a tree has not).
Personality is often misused for person or
people (The personalities involved in the struggle
for control of the company are equally
unlikeable). Again, it is often used when character
would be more suitable; for while personality
describes the combination of outer and
inner characteristics that determine the impression
one makes upon others (He has a pleasing
personality). character describes moral qualities,
ethical standards, principles. He was a man of
weak character is not synonymous with He was
a man of weak personality. Personality may
similarly be confused with such words as disposition,
manner, temperament.
personality; person&y. Though both of these
words refer to that proper to a person, the former
describes those qualities which make a person
what he is, while the latter, a legal term,
denotes personal estate or property as distinguished
from real property (His personalty
consisted of money and goods worth $10,000.00,
his realty of a house and grounds worth
$50,000.00).
personality; pleasiog personality. In common usage
personality suggests distinctive or notable personal
character, but there is no implication in the
word itself of the nature of the distinctiveness.
Therefore, the word frequently requires modification
in the interests of clarity (She has a
friendly personality. He had a disagreeable personality
).
personally; myself. Personally is used by many to
lessen the opprobrium that is commonly felt to
be attached to the use of I. When a man says I
personally am of the opinion that.. . , he usually
means to disavow any intention of speaking for
mankind, or being universal, oracular, infallible.
Such modesty is commendable, but the expression
of an opinion carries certain risks and
responsibilities that cannot be avoided by a mere
redundancy. It is better to say I and accept the
consequences unflinchingly. Some say I myself,
but that is equally redundant and, to the ears of
many, doubles the offensiveness of the first person
singular.
Personally is justified when one wishes to say
that so-and-so did something himself that normally
would have been done by a deputy. Thus
if one says The president personally acknowledged
the little girl’s letter, one stresses the fact
that the acknowledgment was not, as would
otherwise be assumed, the act of a subordinate
using the president’s name. If, however, one says,
The president personally shook hands with twelve
hundred visitors, the use of personally is redundant
because he couldn’t have done it any
other way.
personal pronouns. When used as a grammatical
term, person means the distinction between the
person speaking (first person), the person spoken
to (second person), and the person or thing
spoken about (third person). In English there
are four pronouns (I, me, we, us) which are
first person, and one (yorr) which is second
person. The seven pronouns he, him, she, her,
it, they, and them, are third person, but so are
all the nouns and all the other pronouns in the
language. The form of a verb sometimes depends
upon the person of its subject. For a discussion
of this, see agreement: verbs.
The pronouns just mentioned, together with
their possessive forms (see possessive pronouns),
are called the personal pronouns. Formerly,
English also had three other personal pronouns,
thee, thou, ye, and the possessives thine and thy.
(See the individual words.) Some personal pronouns
are singular and some plural, but this
is determined by the meaning of the word and
gives no trouble. Some of these, such as I, we,
they, are required when the word is standing
before a verb. And some, such as me, us, them,
cannot be used in this position. These problems
are discussed under subjective pronouns and
objective pronouns.