"Till Death Do They Part"?

[Neal Whitman]

A relevant blog post from 2005, pasted in in its entirety:
http://literalminded.wordpress.com/2005/03/19/till-death-do-us-part/

Reading about the Terry Schiavo case, I got to thinking about the phrase
"till death do you part". It never made much sense to me as a kid. It was
years and years before I finally was able to undo the old-fashioned syntax
and morphology to arrive at a clear and sensible reading:

1. As is: "till death do you part"
2. Undo the reversal of verb and direct object: "till death do part you"
3. Turn the subjunctive do into indicative does: "till death does part you"
4. Replace the emphatic does part with the ordinary indicative: "till death
parts you"

Ah, much better! Until I was able to get from "till death do you part" to
"till death parts you", I kept trying to parse the phrase like this:

1. Instead of taking "till" to introduce an entire clause, taking it as a
preposition with "death" as its object, to form an adverbial prepositional
phrase.
2. Taking do you as a subject-auxiliary verb inversion, such as you might
have after negative adverbs, as in "Never have I been so insulted". (To
which the proper reply is, "That's because you don't get around enough!")

In other words, I was trying to read it as, "You part until death!" But that
didn't work because first of all, "till death" didn't contain a negation, so
it shouldn't trigger the do you subject-auxiliary inversion. Second, even
without the inversion, "You part until death" doesn't make sense because
part is a telic verb, but you need an atelic verb to go with the
"till/until" adverbial. That is, since "until X" refers to an interval of
time, you need a verb that refers to something that takes place over an
interval, not at a single point in time. The only way it could work would be
to imagine a continual sequence of parting, coming back together, and
parting again, until death puts an end to the cycle.

So for me, the unworkable semantics trumped the otherwise good syntactic
interpretation I put on the phrase, and I just had to wait until I knew
enough about the language to make the syntax match up with what I knew must
be the intended meaning. But it looks like there are others for whom the
syntax won out over the semantics. You wouldn't know it just by hearing them
say "till death do you part", because "you" is the same whether it's a
subject (in the nonsensical reading) or an object (in the intended but
harder-to-reconcile reading). But the covert reanalysis becomes overt when
"you" is replaced with "us" or "them", and you find "till death do we part"
(http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial_s&q=%22till+death+do+we+part%22&btnG=Search)
and "till death do they part"
(http://www.google.com/search?q=%22till+death+do+they+part%22&btnG=Search&hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial_s)
occurring along with "till death do us/them part".

As a linguist, I can understand it, but I don't have to like it. Why, if I
were a little more uptight, I might be asking myself, "How dare them!"


----- Original Message -----
From: "Jonathan Lighter" <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Sent: Friday, July 16, 2010 9:23 PM
Subject: Re: "Till Death Do They Part"?


> ---------------------- Information from the mail
> header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "Till Death Do They Part"?
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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:
>
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>> 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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>
>
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the
> truth."
>
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