Someone has been putting about reports that Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary, refers to himself in the third person as ‘the Sajid’ or ‘the Saj’. This habit has a long history.
Xenophon entered his own Anabasis 2,400 years ago with the words: ‘There was in that host a certain man, an Athenian, Xenophon.’ Caesar played the same game, as Shakespeare must have noticed at grammar school, later making him die with his own name on his lips: ‘Then fall, Caesar.’ In The Lord of the Rings, Tom Bombadil (who, like Henry James, but in rather a different way, is the Master) does it: ‘Tom was here before the river and the trees; Tom remembers the first raindrop.’
It was Coleridge who coined the term illeism for referring to oneself in the third person. ‘Solicitude to avoid the use of our first personal pronoun,’ he wrote in the second number of his periodical The Friend, for 3 June 1809, ‘more often has its’ [sic] source in conscious selfishness than in true self-oblivion.’
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