Grammar Girl here. In the movie Bill and Ted's excellent adventure, the slacker

protagonists Bill and Ted offer this advice to the world. Be excellent to each

other and party on dudes. But are Bill and Ted running a foul of a rule

regarding reciprocal pronouns? The phrase each other is known as a reciprocal

pronoun because it shows a bidirectional action. For example, if Bill and Ted

are being excellent to each other, that means Bill is being excellent to

Ted and Ted is being excellent to Bill. They're practicing what you might

call excellence reciprocity. But Bill and Ted aren't talking about being

excellent to just Bill and Ted. They want each person in the world to be

excellent to every other person. According to some Grammarians, if we're

talking about more than just two people, we should use a different reciprocal

pronoun, one another. In other words, Bill and Ted should more properly have

said, be excellent to one another. English is unusual in having more than one

reciprocal pronoun to choose from. It doesn't set the record for the most reciprocal

pronouns because Korean has three. But most languages just have one. Chinese,

Finnish, French, classical Greek, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Russian, and American

sign language, among others. I'll have just one reciprocal pronoun. Some

languages such as Spanish and West Greenlandic don't even have that many. They

use the same pronoun as both a reflexive and a reciprocal so that the same

sentence could mean either we see each other or we see ourselves. The trouble

with having a choice of reciprocal pronouns to use in English is that English

speakers and speakers of other languages too can't stand to have more than one

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