In these days of incessant broadcasting of US primary candidates’ utterances, it is not unusual to hear them referring to themselves with their full names rather than the first-person pronoun “I.” Bernard Sanders does this habitually, but he is not alone.

While this linguistic quirk may at first blush seem like a distancing device, it is actually a rhetorical trait of speakers who wish to arrogate to themselves a measure of self-dignification. To refer to oneself by one’s full name rather than the pronoun “I” tends to elevate the ontological status of the speaker by making him/her unique, whereas the use of the first-person pronoun always has a leveling effect, since “I” only and always refers to the speaking subject, a reference that is purely deictic, hence flattened in content because of its second-order (i. e., context-dependent, derivative) status.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO