word

Thankfully I was just unimpressionable enough to avoid attempting to adopt this word as a youngster; during my early teenage years some of my peers showed an unfortunate tendency to attempt to casually (and unironically) utter it, most often as a general hailing-affirmation where they could pitch the sound somewhere between the standard native "yeah?" and the imported equivalent so that if anyone chose to take the piss out of them for attempting to sound American they could try and claim that they had just said "yeah" but that it had just come out wrong. Fortunately there was very little American television available on the standard four channels back then so the number of instances of passable exhibited example-uses (albeit by people with the right accent to carry it off) available on which to base possible implementations was fairly small. There were still some people who would try. Poor fools; if there's one thing the Lincolnshire accent lacks it's coolness and the misguided adoption of exotic utterances jarred horribly.

Recently in New Scientist there have been a series of mentionings concerning the attempted implementation of the word by its creators as a third-person-neuter pronoun. Although we have "one" some people do rather avoid the use thereof as it does smell slightly of Queen, especially after a protracted series of mentionings and I generally find myself drifting back to a nonspecific "you" after half a paragraph or so; there are the equivalents on and mann in French and German which don't seem to carry the same stigma although there may be an equivalent to a native speaker. Maybe mann could be anglicised and introduced as an alternative to one. "Gentleperson might purchase such a hat at a shop in the Grassmarket should gentleperson which gentleperson's head to be so covered. Gentleperson might expect to pay upwards of eighty of the Queen's pounds for the privilege, though. Gentleperson might be better inspecting the secondhand shop a few doors west."

Maybe not. An entity would sound quite ridiculous speaking in such a manner.