As in the movie “Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn”.
It feels olde/tyme and a bit over formal. Syntactically, semantically, vocabularily, legalistically what purpose does the word “one” serve.
I tried to find other examples, but this is a difficult thing to search in google. It thought it was used in Back to the Future on Doc’s epitaph. It wasn’t, but imagine it did: “Shot in the back by one Buford Tannen over a matter of eighty dollars” Gives it that same ring.
Made-up example: “Be on the lookout for one John Q. Doe, wanted for littering.”
In each of these examples taking the “one” out doesn’t alter the meaning in any way. Why is it there at all?
It does not alter the denotative meaning, but “one” in this usage is kind of shorthand for “a particular person of interest for reasons that are or will become obvious to you, namely…”.
There are lots of things we say that we could remove and still leave it clear what we mean.
“It feels olde/tyme and [del]a bit [/del]over formal.”
The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California …www.newspapers.com › newspage
Hack of the legal phrasing of a warrant tbat charges “one John Doe. a Japanese,” with the crime of battery there Is tho story of a race war that has caused not a …
I think in current use it’s mostly poetic and meaningless. But it seems to me that the original use was something like “a person of this name, which you wouldn’t be expected to have heard about”. It told you to not spend much time wondering if this is someone famous that you are blanking on.
But today people know it mostly from olde timey titles and use it as a fancy flourish.
If you just had “…the fantabulous emancipation of Harley Quinn”, then the implication is that the audience is expected to already know who Harley Quinn is. By using “one”, the implication is that the audience is not expected to know this person, and that you are here introducing her. It’s equivalent to “a person by the name of Harley Quinn”.
Which probably doesn’t apply in this case, since Harley Quinn is the one part of the title that the target audience is most likely to recognize. Here, it was probably done just to make it seem old-timey, like a recovered memoir from before said character became famous.
In the following dictionary entry, one possible definition of “one” is “used before a name to denote a person who is not familiar or has not been previously mentioned; a certain”:
So what the title of the movie is equivalent to is this:
Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of a Certain Harley Quinn
or expanded it is equivalent to:
Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of a Certain Harley Quinn, Who May Be Unknown to You
But you probably do know who Harley Quinn is. This is thus really just making a joke. Using “one” in this way once was more common, but now it’s nearly always just a joking reference to a old-fashioned use of the word. But then it’s clear that the title is meant as joke when it includes the word “fantabulous”.
I agree and was trying to come up with a way of saying this which I think your post did excellently.
I agree with those who say in this instance it was meant to be old timey, but also to imply to the audience that the narrator does not know that the audience knows who Harley Quinn is.
I’d go with an attempt at being quirky as opposed to old-timey. As in, they wanted you to know just how HILARIOUS their screenplay was (even if it wasn’t) just going by their “way over the top and crazy” title.
But, yeah, outside of this atypical example, I’d say it’s used to imply that the person referring to this “character” is so unfamiliar with them as to not even be able to distinguish them in a crowd (think “I don’t know him from Adam/her from Eve”). If by chance there happened to be two of them (two people with the same name) and someone were to ask “Which John Smith were you referring to?” the original commentator might say, “Flip if I know, I just found a scrap of paper with the bloke’s name on it at the crime scene. I suppose it’d be whichever one had a motive to kill Ms. Jane Deer, who I am quite certain as to the specific identity of and so do not refer to as ‘one Jane Deer’ because we have her body in the morgue right now.”
I love how in the definition of “one” that Wendell Wagner linked to it defines the number one as “the lowest cardinal number; half of two” Why stop there? Why not a quarter of four? -e[sup]πi[/sup] ?
I never saw the movie but from the title, I thought it was a clever nod to the fact that this was an origin story that took place before the other movies in which we had seen her. I thought it was a fun joke because, while the audience does know her, it shouldn’t have known of her at the time depicted.
But, apparently it’s not an origin movie and the people who named it just did something dumb. If the illiteracy of the writer(s) shows up on the title page, I don’t have a lot reason to check out the end product.
I’d say that these days, except in statements by law enforcement agencies, this particular usage of “one” is far more likely to be ironic or tongue-in-cheek than it is to be genuinely indicating the introduction of a previously unknown person.
That’s what I would ascribe the “Birds of Prey” usage as, rather than illiteracy.