What is the origin of the personal pronouns I, you, he, she, it, we, and they?
Learn English – Origin of the personal pronouns
etymologypersonal-pronouns
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Well, if you're that bothered about avoiding personal pronouns, you can always say "The author", "The researcher" etc. It's really a matter of preference; not all scientists think there's anything terribly wrong with good old-fashioned words like "I" and "we"...
You may also want to see if you can actually find a scientific study attesting to the perceived indirectness or doubt of the passive.
Identifying the specific origin of a phrase is often impossible, though something can always be said about its history. But in this case we can do better. The phrase was popularized in connection with the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich.
Difficulty of finding early uses in print
Search tools are unreliable. Google Book Search says the phrase was current as early as 1961, as evidenced by this excerpt from a crime novel:
A scream of pain, then a low groan, signaled that his timing had been perfect. Contact had been established, up close and personal. down the middle of his forehead. (G. A. McKevett, Helen McCully, Eleanor Noderer. Just Desserts. Kensington Books, 1961.) [emphasis added]
However, Google Book Search is wrong; the book was published in 1995. There are various other GBS dead ends.
Connection to 1972 Olympic games
But there is an interesting true development in 1972. Sports-film producer Michael Samuelson writes:
I knew it was impossible to send film crews all over the world, yet all over the world is exactly where Olympians live, and I wanted to show them “up close and personal”, to get at their non-athletic personalities, their uniqueness as human beings.
—Michael Samuelson. “Behind the Scenes at the Olympic Games ‘Shoot’”, American Cinematographer, Volume 53, Nov. 1972, p. 1281. [emphasis added]
And then Jim McKay, famous host of Wide World of Sports for ABC who covered twelve Olympic Games for ABC and introduced the phrase “the thrill of victory – and the agony of defeat” into popular memory, writes in 1973:
The idea of the personality pieces (they’ll probably be called “up-close and personal”) can be shown by the contrasting thoughts of two American swimmers. One piece is on Mark Spitz, the brash young Californian by way of Indiana University … . (Jim McKay. My Wide World, Macmillan, 1973, p. 120.) [emphasis added]
It was around this time that the phrase “up close and personal” began its rise to popularity. (See: Google Ngram Viewer chart.)
Popularization by ABC Sports
It turns out that Jim McKay did a series of ABC television segments consisting of interviews of 1972 Olympic athletes, and these segments were called “Up Close and Personal”. (For details start with: Google Search, [jim mckay up close and personal
].)
The phrase is not original to Jim McKay, but he popularized it and it remained associated with him in the public mind for the rest of his life.
The name of the segment was apparently chosen by Don Foley at ABC, who later said:
I did it with some embarrassment—it's so ungrammatical and advertiserese. I started life as an English teacher. But I decided to forget my pride and go with the thing. (Don Foley, quoted by William Taaffe. “Adding That Personal Touch: ABC’s profiles of athletes bring warmth and bad grammar to the Olympics”, Sports Illustrated, July 30, 1984.) [Tip of the hat to @Hugo for digging up that admission.]
Foley did not say where he got the phrase; neither did he say specifically that he invented it. But he is as close to an origin as we are likely to come.
Best Answer
I haven't got time to take them all the way (or to check references, so this is from memory), but yes they do go back to PIE, with the possible exception of she. But they come by different routes.
I hope somebody has time to expand my random recollections.