I’ve heard before of people referring to the word “we” in a sentence as being a “royal” we. What does that mean?
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Traditionally, people in high office, such as monarchs, have often used “we” even when they’re only talking about themselves. This can be because they see themselves as representing a nation or organisation, or it can just be a way of sounding grandiose and signalling that they view others as beneath them. It’s quite common for people to be mocked or criticised for doing this, though in a lot of cases it’s unclear whether that was their intent, or whether it was a slip of the tongue or they were trying to indicate that they were speaking on behalf of some specific group of people. An infamous example was when Margaret Thatcher said “We have become a grandmother.”
There are also lots of situations where someone uses “we” in a different sense and people wrongly understand it to be the royal we. For example, many authors use “we” to mean “you and I”, and it’s common for people to use “we” to talk about a group of people without explicitly saying who they are talking about (“we went to see that band” = “my partner and I went to see that band”, “this thing happened at work and we were all stressed out” = “my colleagues and I were stressed out”).
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