Richardson, Samuel. Clarissa (1768) VII. 18: "If by thy We's and Us's thou meanest thyself or me."

OED Definition 7

Naut. = Our vessel.

1622 R. HAWKINS Voy S. Sea 66 We had taken the Vice-admirall, the first time shee bourded with us.

1719 DEFOE Crusoe II. (Globe) 519 They crowded after us, and endeavoured to come under our Stern, so as to board us.

c1800 in N. & Q. 12th Ser. XI. 42 General Bowls..happened to be on board of us, taking his passage..to Jamaica.

DESTRUCTION OF THE HUDSON RIVER STEAMBOAT "ISAAC NEWTON" BY FIRE, DECEMBER 5, 1863.

From Harper's Weekly, December 19, 1863

WHAT ABOUT ANONYMOUS/VIRTUAL AUTHOR-SHIP?

Virtual Ship, Under Construction

Mikhail Epstein Quote:

"Poststructuralism has pronounced the death sentence for the individual author(ship), but does this mean that we are doomed to return to the pre-literary stage of anonymity? One cannot enter twice the same river, and anonymity in its post-authorial, not pre-authorial, implementation will turn into something different from folklore anonymity. What would be, then, a progressive, not retrospective, way out of the crisis of individual authorship? Not anonymity, I believe, but hyper-authorship.

"There is so much talk about hypertexts now... But what about hyper-authors? This question has not been even raised. Hyper-authorship is a paradigmatic variety of authors working within one (allegedly one) human entity. Hyper-author relates to an author similarly to how hypertext relates to a text. Hypertext is dispersed among numerous Virtual Spaces that can be entered in any order, escaping any linear (temporal or causal) coherence. Hyper-authorship is dispersed among several virtual personalities which cannot be reduced to a single "real" personality.

"As thinking is always thinking "of," without necessary specification of the object, writing is always "writing by," but this "byness" of writing cannot be reduced to any biological, or historical or psychological subject. In the traditional literary theory, the author is a real individual or a group of individuals, but this is an outmoded way of thinking which can be compared with the conceptual framework of physics before the advent of quantum mechanics. The latter showed that we cannot pinpoint a particle with any specific locaton and time, it is a fuzzy phenomenon, embracing the aspects of discreteness and continuity, a particle as well as a wave. What I am discussing now is precisely the concept of fuzzy, or "continuum-like" authorship, which is not a discrete personality but rather a wave, going across times, places and personalities."