Crash Course

There's occasionally an ad on the sign-in screen for my Yahoo! mail that's been driving me up the wall. It says,

Spammers giveth
Yahoo! Mail taketh away

which, of course, with modernized verb endings, means "Spammers gives, Yahoo! Mail takes away."

This is obviously incorrect.

Worse by far is some fast-food ad on the homepage with a tie-in to yet another Shrek movie. As if that weren't bad enough news, the ad says, at the bottom - in what I assume is meant to be a second-person imperative* aimed at hapless web users like you and me: "Clicketh and drooleth."

Clicks and drools? Who does?!

So apparently it's time for me to have a cozy little sit-down with the Internet at large and give it a quick lesson in archaic English conjugation.

Alllll righty. So, I give. You/we/they give. He/she/it giveth. Thou givest. Got it?

Mind you, this is indicative mood. Imperative mood is different. For example, if I'm just telling you that, mmm! you go, honey, I'd say "thou goest;" but if it's a command, I'll say "Go thou!" (Prithee.)

"You," incidentally, is the plural of "thou," in the nominative case, with "ye" and "thee" in both the accusative and dative cases. Simply put, "ye" is to "you," and "thee" is to "thou," as "me" is to "I." So I don't expect to see any more of those errors online from now on.

Of course, "you" is also employed when addressing a single person formally. "You" is used for your liege lord, your boss, slight acquaintances, and respectable strangers. It's the equivalent of addressing someone by last name and honorific. "Thou" is familiar: use it for your lover, your family, your pets, or the kind of riffraff who'd only give themselves airs if you spoke respectfully to them.

God counts as a family member (and only one - so much for the Nicene Creed!) and is addressed as "Thou," but don't forget to capitalize it, or He'll smite your ass.

I trust this clears everything up.

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*Or, in soulless marketing parlance, a "call to action."