Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="mmadsen" data-source="post: 2246552" data-attributes="member: 1645">Don't be sorry at all; I enjoyed the tangent!Anyway, I just read what the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou" target="_blank">Wikipedia</a> had to say about thou, and I found this passage interesting: Thou had almost gone out of usage entirely in most English dialects by the year 1650. Its use in the Bible and in classical literature like Shakespeare gave thou an air of formality and solemnity. This usage has entirely dispelled any air of informal familiarity that might have hung around thou; it is used in solemn ritual occasions, in readings from the King James Bible, in Shakespeare, and in starchily formal literary compositions that seek to evoke the solemn emotions called forth by these antecedents. Since becoming obsolete in spoken English, it has nevertheless been used by more recent writers to address exalted beings such as God [1] (<a href="http://wyllie.lib.virginia.edu:8086/perl/toccer-new?id=RsvPsal.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=90&division=div1)" target="_blank">http://wyllie.lib.virginia.edu:8086/perl/toccer-new?id=RsvPsal.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=90&division=div1)</a>, a skylark [2] (<a href="http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~stephan/webstuff/poetry/Shelley-OdetoaSkylar.html)" target="_blank">http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~stephan/webstuff/poetry/Shelley-OdetoaSkylar.html)</a>, Achilles [3] (<a href="http://www.bartleby.com/166/38.html)" target="_blank">http://www.bartleby.com/166/38.html)</a>, and even The Mighty Thor [4] (<a href="http://paratime.ca/mv1/avengers/thor/thor528.html)" target="_blank">http://paratime.ca/mv1/avengers/thor/thor528.html)</a>. In Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Darth Vader, speaking to the Emperor, says, "What is thy bidding, master?" These recent uses of the pronoun suggest something far removed from intimate familiarity or condescension. The Revised Standard Version of the Bible, which first appeared in 1946, retained the pronoun thou exclusively to address God, using you in other places; the New Revised Standard Version (1989) omits thou entirely.I only recently learned that the Quakers used thee longer than other English-speakers, but I didn't realize the reasoning: Quakers formerly used thee as an ordinary pronoun; the stereotype has them saying thee for both nominative and accusative cases. This was started by George Fox at the beginning of the Quaker movement as an attempt to preserve the egalitarian familiarity associated with the pronoun; it was not heard that way, and seemed instead to be an affected attempt at speaking like the King James Bible. Most Quakers have abandoned this usage.</blockquote>

Verification