"Till Death Do They Part"?

[Wilson Gray]

"Till the end of time,: as the "old standard" put it.

Back in the 'Fiddies, a popular R&B tune of the day ended with, in
four-part harmony embellished with melisma,

"Till death do we part."

It always made me feel embarrassed, given that the saying,

"If you don't know, you betta aks somebody"

had been around for a century or so and they had ignored it.

Joel, you must be, relatively-speaking, quite young, because my
*feeling* is that _'til(l)_ came out of hypercorrection nowhere only a
couple of years ago. Of course, I know intellectually that it's been
used over quite a few years by any number of writers. Nevertheless, my
emotional response to it is that it suddenly appeared out of nowhere
for no clear reason, since nobody could possibly think that _till_ is
somehow an abbreviation of _until_. The =seemingly sudden emergence of
_'til(l)_ is as unfathomable as the likewisem seemingly-sudden
appearance of sentences of the type,

"I decided to not go"

in place of

"I decided not to go."

_'til(l)_ and the type, _ decided to not go_, really annoy me,
especially since there's nothing that can be done about this kind of
thing, as I found out back in the '60's when I tried to tell a fellow
native of Texas that that the word _ballad_ "a kind of song" doesn't
have exactly the same pronunciation as _Ballard_ "a surname," unless
she intended to maintain her (our) native, arrhotic Texas dialect in
California.

She did not receive correction. First, she reacted as though I had
suddenly gone stark, raving mad. Then, she burst into laughter, as
though I had said something unbelievably stupid.

-Wilson


On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 10:17 PM, Ann Burlingham
<ann at burlinghambooks.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Ann Burlingham <ann at BURLINGHAMBOOKS.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "Till Death Do They Part"?
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 10:10 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
>> Subject:      Re: "Till Death Do They Part"?
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> At 7/16/2010 09:37 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>>>What's wrong with "till"?  Dictionaries love it.
>>
>> I'm not a dictionary, I don't have to love it (without an apostrophe).
>
> I've never had a problem using "till" to replace "until."
>
> -Ann, till the cows come home
>
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>



--
-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
–Mark Twain

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