Cluing ONE

That's me! I'm the cluing one!

ONE has a lot of definitions to work with, and they don’t take much explanation, but could use a little exploration.

1. Most of us learn it first as just a number, of course, after we are (age) one but usually before (grade) one. You can do “Series opener,” “Quarter of four,” or “Hydrogen’s number.”

2. As a neutral pronoun, one predates they/them and other variants like zie. You could call it “‘I’ pronoun” or “A certain person” or go with “___ does not simply walk into Mordor.”

3. One is the lowest dollar amount, a Washington, a price tag at Dollar Tree, about 92 cents (at the moment) of the euro. It’s also a word found on a penny and—oddly enough—on a dime.

4. One is a time: 1300 hours, a latish lunchtime. Actually, it’s two times every day, but if you’re awake for 1 AM, you’re either doing something wrong or something very right.

5. “One” is a song…actually, “One” is a whole playlist of songs. There are lyrically distinct tunes with that title by U2, Metallica, Ed Sheeran, Three Dog Night, the Bee Gees, and A Chorus Line. And that doesn’t even cover fill-in-the-blanks like ___ Direction and “Hit Me Baby, ___ More Time.” One, two, three, four…

6. The word “one” can emphasize solitariness, as in “There’s one way to go on this road,” “We’ve got one chance left,” or “He was just a one-hit wonder.”

7. On the other hand, “one” can stand for many if they’re united by a common purpose, indivisible, inseparable. We are one.

8. It was briefly trendy to use “one” as a substitute exclamation point. We’re mostly over that, but you might still clue “one” as “Q’s neighbor on the keyboard” or “!, if you forget to press shift.”

9. If you’re “on E,” then either you need to find a gas station immediately or you’re doing drugs and therefore shouldn’t be driving in the first place.

   {EDIT TO ADD: I missed a third meaning of “on E”—“on estrogen,” as when transitioning to female! I’d probably rank this one a little higher on that basis.]