MDDM Ch. 75 Thee
Dave Monroe
davidmmonroe at yahoo.com
Sun Sep 8 11:59:17 CDT 2002
"'Having determin'd after deep study in Mr. C. Dicey's
County Atlas that it is impossible to travel from here
to Scotland without passing your doorstep, I should be
oblig'd for any recommendation of a good Inn for the
night, whence I shall beg leave to make You Thee a
brief visit.'" (M&D, Ch. 75, p. 733)
Couldn't figure out how to display "You" sous rature
here ...
http://www.fandm.edu/departments/English/d_steward/toolbox.html#bracketed
But cf. ...
"Resolutely a-beam, pronouncing the forms of You
consciously, as if borrowing them from another
Tongue." (M&D, Ch. 3, p. 16)
>From Richard Bauman, Let Your Words Be Few: Symbolism
of Speaking and Silence among Seventeenth-Century
Quakers (New York: Cambridge UP, 1983), Ch. 4, "Christ
respects no man's person: the plain language and the
rhetoric of impoliteness," pp. 43-62 ...
"The best known of the Quaker speech testimonies
was that which rejected the use of 'you' in the second
person singular, insisting instead upon 'thou' and
'thee.' The most superficial justification for this
usage, though inherently accurate and logical, was
that the use of 'you' to designate the singular was
simply ungrammatical, and in this sense not true: 'I
is a particular, Thee is a particular, Thou is a
particular, single, pure proper unto one. We is many,
Ye is many, They is many, and You more than one'
(Farnsworth, [The Pure Language of the Spirit of
Truth,] 1655)....
[...]
"But the Quakers were interested in more than
linguitic purity for it own sake; their arguments in
defense of their pronominal usage ran deeper that mere
grammar. Certainly a more important factor in their
own eyes was the evidence of the Bible. According to
their reading of the scriptures, the equivalents of
'thou' and 'thee' were employed by Christ and the
primitive Christians as well as in parts of the Old
Testament .... In this light the generalization of
'you' was a late corruption, attributed to popes and
emperors imitating their heathens' homage to their
gods ... and thus to be done away with together with
the rest of the empty customs of the world. Once
again, it mattered not at all that 'you' had become
customary as a singular form ...; one's duty was to be
faithful to truth, not to custom ....
"Most important, however, as with titles and hat
honor, was that the form employed to designate the
second person singular was intimately bound up with
questions of social rank and etiquette. The use of
'you' to a singleindividual communicated deference,
honor, courtesy; 'thou' imparted intimacy or
condescension when used to a close equal or
subordinate, but contempt when addressed to a more
distant equal or superior--either that or
boorishnes.... Thus, by refusing to use 'you' to a
single inividual because it represented a form of
worldly honor, and using 'thou' intead, the Quakers
provoked the hostility of others, who took their
behavior as a sign of contempt.... Besides being
grammatically untrue, the use of 'you' in the singular
constituted a force of worldly honor, which was
rendered all the more odious by the circumstance that
those who insisted on the use of the honorific 'you'
to themselves addresses God, to whom honor was truly
due, as 'thou' in their prayers....
"From this vantage point the use of 'thou' to a
single person became a means of attacking the fleshly
pride that demanded honor and deference.... The
honorific form was deliberately rejected to exert a
humbling effect upon the person addressed, a reminder
of the vanity of worldly honor. [George] Fox
[1624-1691] expressed the principle clearly: 'This
"thou" and "thee" was a fearful cut to proud flesh and
self-honour' ...." (pp. 54-55)
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