Manawatu Standard

It maketh not sense

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pronoun in current English) and the correspond­ing object pronoun was thee (matching them as an object pronoun). When we find the following in a 2011 novel, we know something is not right: There but for the grace of God go thee. Who does the going? You do, so the form should be thou. But if the pronoun is thou, the verb should agree with that and be goest.

If the author is not trying to make a point about the character depicted, they are getting themselves into trouble.

Even Shelley seems to get tangled up. Hail to thee, blithe spirit ( thee is right here, after the prepositio­n to), Bird thou never wert. Thou wert is perfectly correct – or at least in line with the usage of the King James version of the Bible – if it is subjunctiv­e (as in modern English if I were you).

But there seems to be no reason to have a subjunctiv­e here, so we would expect Bird thou never wast. However, the Oxford English Dictionary says that, outside the Bible, wert has been used for the simple past, so Shelley is saved.

What about the old - th forms? Recall that these appear where we now have - s, and nowhere else. So in a line from a 2010 novel, Why hath we been given the command to row?, hath must be wrong because we could not replace it with modern has. Perhaps it looks archaic, perhaps it is an error on the part of the author, but someone has lost track of their English grammar.

Similarly, from The Dominion Post in 2012, An All Blacks side whose cup is threatenin­g to runneth over, runneth makes no sense in the sentence, even if it recalls the biblical expression.

Finally, we find a similar problem, albeit in a slightly different environmen­t, in a 2008 novel: Maybe the clothes do maketh the man. Could we say makes here? No, we need make.

So maketh does not make sense, and in this case does not even recall the original, assuming it was from Mark Twain (probably based on the German Kleider machen Leute); the older version is mannersmak­eth the man – where manners, like measles, could be singular.

I do not want to suggest writers should avoid archaisms where they are appropriat­e, but here the grammar is being used as a symbol, not meaningful­ly, andwhere you get the grammar wrong, you confuse the message (and often your readers).

 ?? GETTY IMAGES ?? Shakespear­e could mix up old and new, but modern writers often get it wrong.
GETTY IMAGES Shakespear­e could mix up old and new, but modern writers often get it wrong.

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