You can't google something if you don't know what it's called

[Glizdka]

I'm looking for the name grammarians give to using you in sentences that state general facts and observations when the outcome doesn't depend on who the performer would be, in a similar way we could use we or one.

"You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."
"You can't spell families without lies."
"You don't simply walk into Mordor."

In this kind of sentence, I'm not telling you, my dear reader, that you, personally, don't have enough skill to do these things. It's a general fact or observation and, to me, it looks like you functions as something of a dummy pronoun, just to supply the sentence with a subject, but I suspect grammarians have a proper term for this use of you.

In Polish, we have a dedicated grammatical structure for this kind of sentence, a structure English doesn't have. This makes students from Poland sometimes mistake such sentences for being addressed by the speaker, personally. I'm trying to find some papers on this structure or exercises, but I don't know what to type in Google. Could you help me out?

 

[kilroy65]

impersonal/generic 'you'

 

[Glizdka]

impersonal/generic 'you'

This led me to a Wikipedia article that calls it the fourth-person singular impersonal pronoun.

 

[Tdol]

Not many people still use one.

 

[teechar]

Not many people still use one.

I do, or at least try to.

 

[Tarheel]

Not many people still use one.

I do, but "you" comes much more naturally to me. (It's possible that this forum has influenced me to use "one" more than I otherwise would.)

 

[Glizdka]

One might say one sounds more formal and a bit old-fashioned, and you couldn't argue against it.