Thou Shalt Not Vandalize Verbs

Jan Freeman, Boston Globe columnist (and one of the very few language columnists who actually knows something about language instead of merely holding a few strong prejudices) wrote her column today about the Newsweek article dealing with the transformation of The DaVinci Code into a film.

That headline was

Thou shalt not like it.

As she asks, does Newsweek think enjoying the movie is a sin?

She concludes they don't (unlike some folks out there) - in fact the article is about how you might really, really want your favorite book to be made into a movie, but owing to the differences between novels and films, a good novel may make a lousy movie, and even if it's not a lousy movie it may lose all the things you loved about the book. (This is why I feared the Lord of the Rings movies (and why I accept all the changes Jackson had to make to create such wonderful movies), and why I think most Stephen King books make bad movies ...) What Newsweek meant to say was

Thou wilt not like it. (Or, perhaps, Thou mayest not like it.)

She points out that even though most Americans don't grasp the full paradigm of Middle English verbs and pronouns, or the intricacies of "shall vs will" ("I will drown, for no one shall save me," asserts the suicide, while the accident victim cries the reverse, "I shall drown, for no one will save me!") still, virtually all of them know that "thou shalt not" is a command.

She asks:

So what made Newsweek's editors think it was OK to pretend that "Thou shalt not" could be employed to mean "You won't"? I suspect a severe case of Ye Olde Gift Shoppe syndrome, the delusion that since nobody speaks Elizabethan English anymore, you can invent cute archaisms just by sticking obsolete verb endings and pronouns into your prose at random, like currants in a plum pudding.

She goes on, very cogently and entertainingly, to decry this whole syndrome.

I applaud her. I hate things like "Their cups runneth over" (275 google hits on that exact phrase), "He dost protest too much" (70 on that one), "you doth" (10,900!!!), "you goeth" - one hit on that is someone actually instructing RenFest goers to say "he/she goest" and "you goeth"! Argh!

I grant you this is trivial in the Grand Scheme of Things© but it's also not that hard to get right. Also, as she points out,

Even if these are too trivial to bother about, you can hardly argue that "Thou shalt not"--however archaic its form--is obsolete or obscure. And last time I checked, most US high schools were assigning at least one play by Shakespeare. Is it too much to ask that the kids who go on to edit national publications retain just the suspicion that all those sayeths and shalts were not mere random decorations?

Maybe it is. Maybe this is a lost cause.

But it still annoys me.

I'm glad to see I'm not alone in this.