When Editors Attack
For what it’s worth, I do think the each other/one another distinction is pointless. If anyone gives you trouble about this, say I said it was OK.
Small Peculiar
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For what it’s worth, I do think the each other/one another distinction is pointless. If anyone gives you trouble about this, say I said it was OK.
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This distinction seems real to me. It would throw me off to read “The whole crowd loved each other” or “Walter and Batty agreed to perform lobotomies on one another”. I would have to stop and figure out the grammar before I could deal with the content.
Ethan
But do you think that’s a useful distinction to have in your mind between the two terms? Obviously nothing in language is objectively true, these are squiggles on a screen invented by humans who determine the rules by which they operate (OK, I’ve heard there’s some evidence that certain precepts of grammar are hardwired into the human brain but let’s handwave that for the moment)—so does enforcing that distinction contribute to comprehensibility in any way? I would argue it doesn’t, as it does to, say, enforce a distinction between “literally” and “figuratively.”
“The whole crowd loved each other” throws me off because I would have interpreted “the whole crowd” as a singular. I would probably ask the author to reword that (or, being realistic, do it myself). “Walter and Batty agreed to perform lobotomies on one another” reads fine to me—in terms of the grammar, anyway.