"Till Death Do They Part"?

[Joel S. Berson]

I don't think I could say "'til [not "till"!] death do them part"
nohow.  But I might be able to say "'til death do part them".

Joel

At 7/16/2010 09:23 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>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
> >
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>
>--
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>
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