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I felt the article of New York Times N.Y. Region section (July 25) titled “A Revenge Plot So Intricate, the Prosecutors Were Pawns” reporting a woman being framed by her boyfriend into the charge with carrying out a series of armed robberies very intriguing. But I was hung up on one minor point – the function of the word, ‘one’ in the following sentence of the article:

“One night, Ms. Sumasar was pulled over by the police. Before she could speak, detectives slapped handcuffs on her. “You know you did it,” she said one later shouted at her. “Just admit it.”

What does ‘one’ here mean? Does it mean ‘one of the detectives’ or ‘a second later’? I am confused.

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It stands for one of the detectives. This sentence is poorly constructed, because it is difficult to parse; but it is syntactically correct. The conjunction that has been omitted (which is fine in itself).

“One night, Ms. Sumasar was pulled over by the police. Before she could speak, detectives slapped handcuffs on her. “You know you did it,” she said that one detective later shouted at her. “Just admit it.”

In a simpler sentence, this construction would be fine, because then there'd be no cause for confusion:

The picture she said I had stolen was in her attic.

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  • I'd actually rewrite it as She said that one detective later shouted at her, "You know you did it. Just admit it."
    – Marthaª
    Commented Jul 26, 2011 at 23:44
  • ＠Malvolio / @Martha. I was relieved to find your comments, because I suspected if 'one later shouted at her’ in this sentence is taken for granted to any native speakers, allowing no room for questioning.
    – Yoichi Oishi
    Commented Jul 27, 2011 at 2:20
  • @Martha: Right, you could do that. It would change word order but make it much more readable.
    – Cerberus - Reinstate Monica
    Commented Jul 27, 2011 at 2:37
  • @Yoichi-san, I wouldn't worry that we find it that easy to read! The reason I don't find "a second" as easy to substitute as a possible meaning is that I must fill in a lot of other words to make it work: "one moment later he shouted at her," for example. My mind does fill these in at first - I might find the same meaning on a first read - but if read carefully and force myself not to fill in any seemingly missing words, "detective" is the only "one" that works.
    – aedia λ
    Commented Jul 27, 2011 at 4:10

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