Thee, Thou, and You-all: How to Talk to You

If writers want to make their characters sound formal, they may drop the words thou and thee into the dialogue. Yet, nothing is further from the meaning of the words thee and thou, which were used to show informality, closeness, affection, or sheer contempt.

As English lost the words thou and thee, it also lost something else, a way to distinguish between a singular form of you and a plural. I can say, "You are my friend" (obviously speaking to one person) or "You are my friends" (speaking to more than one). Or, as a Southerner, I might say, "You-all are my friends." (As a Southerner, I cringe when I hear Yankee actors saying, "You-all is my friend.")

What Didst Thou Mean?

Thou was simply the singular form for the second person, that is, the person spoken to, or you, with the plural being ye. "Thou art my friend," and "Ye are my friends." We have also lost ye, except in a few rare phrases, such as "Hear ye!" and "God rest ye merry, gentlemen!" (Notice the correct location of the comma.)

Later, thou came to be used informally, in expressions of familiarity or emotional closeness or, in some circumstances, disdain, the opposite of the way we think of it today. If you have ever studied French or Spanish, you have dealt with the two levels of you: in French, tu and vous, in Spanish, tú and usted. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway used thou and you to show the relationships between his Spanish-speaking characters. (With his attempts to capture other Spanish forms and to avoid English obscenities, he came up with some odd sentences: "I obscenity in the milk of thy republicanism.")

What Was Thy Basic Grammar?

The word thou is a second person singular pronoun in English. It is now largely archaic, replaced by you. Thou is the form for the subject (that is, the nominative form). The object form is thee, and the possessive forms are thy and thine (corresponding to my and mine). Most of the verbs used with thou have the endings -st or -est. There are a few irregular verb forms, such as thou art (to be) and thou hast (to have).

Whyfore Art Thou Religious?

In the early 1500s, when William Tyndale translated the Bible into English, he used thou to reflect the singular and ye the plural distinctions in the Hebrew and Greek originals, a usage that was preserved in the Authorized or King James Version of the Bible (1611).

George Fox, who founded the Society of Friends, or Quakers, promoted the "plain speaking" of addressing everyone with thee as a form of "plain speaking." The equivalent in modern English would be address all people equally by call them by their first names. Again, portrayals of Quakers in films make them seem stuffy, because of their pronouns, while the intention was the opposite. (By the way, I have never known a modern Quaker who spoke in this way.)

What Hast Thou Lost?

In earlier literature, there is often a drama going on that we cannot follow. In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, with its wide range of social types, there is a wide use of second person pronouns, such as you may find in modern Spanish. At the conclusion of the "Pardoner's Tale," for instance, when the Knight is trying to restore peace after the Pardoner and the Host have gotten angry with each other, he addresses the Host as "ye, sire Hoost" and says to the Pardoner, "I prey thee, drawe thee neer."

Shakespeare never seemed to play strictly by the thee/thou rules, but his characters often make such a distinction. In Richard III, Act I, Sc. 2 (here) Lady Anne and Gloucester weave back and forth from thou to you as their feelings and relationships change. Gloucester speaks to her with the appropriately formal you:

Lady, you know no rules of charity,

Which renders good for bad, blessings for curses.

Lady Anne, on the other hand, speaks to him, the man who killed her husband and father-in-law, with thou, to show her disgust:

Villain, thou know'st no law of God nor man:

No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity.

I had a Cuban friend who told me that when his mother was angry with him, she would speak to him with the usted form. He said that that was worse than a spanking, because it put them at such a distance, and he remarked that English-speaking parents don't have such an option. They do, however. I have heard parents add a sarcastic formality to their utterances: "OK, Mister, why did you do that?" Or, "Young lady, you get in here."

Once in the lovely Mexican city of Mérida, a young woman who waited on me in a shop spoke to me with the tú form. That evening at the hotel, I asked the clerks there if that was an acceptable usage in their region. They assured me that it was not, and that she must have been a prostituta. Now, that is something that we just cannot convey in English, without our thou and thee!

You can find an index to my articles on other topics relating to the English language here.