YEARS: 5–6 Have you ever wondered where sayings like 'golly gosh', 'by gum' or 'drat' come from? And so that one would have pushed out the 'thou'. But also, I think if you didn't know someone, best to err on the side of politeness. Probably because it was the more complicated one, grammatically, so we dumped it. The 'you' emerged as the all-purpose pronoun in English. It's kind of interesting to think why we lost the 'thou' pronouns. It didn't last long, because we lost the 'thou' pronouns in the 1500s, or they started to drop out during that time. Or I might be disrespectful, by 'thou'-ing someone. Or you might 'ye' and 'you' me, if you wanted to show respect.
And in the 13th century, we got the idea from the French, to use the 'thou' forms for informal use, between mates. And then there were the 'ye' and the 'you' forms. English had the 'thou', 'thee' and 'thy' pronouns, and they were singular. 'Why did English drop the use of the polite form of you, which many languages have?' From Linda Robertson from Kaleen in the ACT. Well, we've lost that sort of idiom, really. You know, 'Sufferin' succotash' and 'Gee-whittakers' and 'Flippin' heck'. So there are a whole lot of these strange ones. It was just that Gordon Bennett had the right arrangements of a thousand consonants, I think, that made it appropriate, as a re-modelling of something, say, like 'Gorblimey'. Well, there was an inspiration for 'Gordon Bennett', and it was probably a Scottish-born fellow, who became the editor of the New York Herald.īut it really doesn't matter who Gordon Bennett was. 'By gum' or 'Good grief' or 'By Godfrey'. Sort of re-modellings of re-modellings, I suppose. And then there appeared a whole heap of really strange ones. 'May God blind me', or 'Drat'! 'May God rot your bones'… or any other part of you, for that matter. They're very innocent-sounding, but they disguise often something a lot more horrible. It appeared in the 1800s, along with a whole heap of other really strange exclamations. 'What does the cockney expression Gordon Bennett stand for?' From Shirley Doolan from Bardwell Park in New South Wales.
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