"Till Death Do They Part"?

[Jonathan Lighter]

Larry, I heard the same phrase used by a non-journalist on the news a couple
of years ago with absolutely no irony detectable.  Something like, "They
said their vows and till death do they part."

Some Inglish speakers presumably can't handle the syntax and
semi-rationalize what to them is a frozen idiom meaning roughly, "we/they
will be together till one dies."

Kind of like the Inglish phrase, "Suffer the little children," reported here
some time ago, interpreted to mean "The little children are suffering" or
even "Sometimes even little children must suffer."



JL

On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 9:08 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      "Till Death Do They Part"?
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I take it this is another for the "Woe am/is I" file.  At least I've
> always assumed that the line in the (old-style) standard wedding
> ceremony (from the Book of Common Prayer, perhaps?) involves the
> pronoun as the object, not the subject, of "do...part":
>
> "To have and to hold, from this day forward; for better, for worse;
> for richer, for poorer; in sickness and health; to love and cherish,
> till death us do part"
>
> or maybe
>
> "...till death do us part" (so suggests wikipedia).  Either way, it's
> "us" and not "we", the latter of which would make no sense
> whatsoever--until we part death?  So when the Times Magazine story on
> cryogenics  last Sunday (I'm just getting around to recycling it) was
> entitled "Till Death Do They Part", I couldn't make sense of that
> either.  Granted, it's a play on the wedding vows, with the funky
> word order and all, and the idea is, well, let's let the subtitle
> tell it:
>
> The men who want to be cryonically preserved, and the women who
> sometimes find it hard to be married to them.
>
> It's about "the hostile wife phenomenon", as the "cryonicists" see
> it.  OK, difference of opinion, I get that.  Creates rift in the
> marriage before he kicks the frozen bucket, I get that too.  So it's
> still a case of death parting the couple, only now it's before they
> become, what's the expression, metabolically discordant, right?  But
> I still don't get why it's not "Till Death Do Them Part", in the
> headline and the Contents page, rather than "Till Death Do They
> Part".  Am I missing something?
>
> LH
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



--
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org