Here is a critic’s comment on my last week’s column ‘learn the correct usage of articles in English’:
‘Articles’ is a grammar topic with a difference. It’s a hard nut to crack. By the way, you may have observed the Indian tendency to indiscriminately use ‘one’ as in ‘One John has come to see you.’
The second part of the mail deals with the correctness of the use of “one” as in the example mentioned in the paragraph above. It is a very interesting observation.
Some of my students and colleagues have asked me whether it is correct to use “one” in the place of “a” or “an” as in the example. Let’s try to understand the usage of one in the english language. Consider these two
sentences:
There is a John waiting for you at the reception.
There is one John waiting for you at the reception.
Both the sentences convey the same meaning. Here, we are talking about a person called John who is unknown to both the speaker and the receiver of the message.
Either the article “a” or the pronoun “one” can be used before the name (John) to communicate the intended message.
The word “one” has many different and varied meanings in English language. One of the meanings is “unknown person” according to the Cambridge dictionary.
“One” is used before the name of a person who is not known as in the sentence:
My son’s class teacher is one Kavitha Rajesh.
Here, what the speaker implies is that the teacher Kavitha Rajesh is not known to them. We can come across many sentences with the meaning of the word “one” in both British and American varieties of English.
Here are a few examples from the British and the American National Corpora:
The spokesman for the organising committee was one Dr Harrison Rogers.
Britain’s No. 1 supermarket chain started out in 1869 when one John Sainsbury opened a dairy shop in London’s Drury Lane.
According to Elzea, the model for the figure was one Mr Wilson, a professional model from whom Sloan had borrowed a costume for a ball…
The landowner, one Mr Devetin, had left him in control of the estate before emigrating to...
Learners of English should know when to correctly use “one” and “ones”. The plural of the numerical pronoun “one” is “ones”.
We use “one” in the place of a singular noun and “ones” in the place of a plural noun to avoid repetitions. Look at these
examples:
Who is your son, the tall one or the short one?
Is your phone the black one?
“I’ll collect my books from you tomorrow.” “Which books?” “The ones you borrowed from me last week.”
The ones who support you now may not support you tomorrow.
“You can’t let one bad moment spoil a bunch of good ones.” – Dale Earnhardt
— rayanal@yahoo.co.uk