Thou shalt not vandalize verbs
THOUGH YOU MAY already see, dead ahead in this paragraph, a mention of a certain movie based on a best-selling novel--yep, here it comes, ``The Da Vinci Code"--be not afraid. Our topic is not the works of Dan Brown, but the language of Newsweek, which ran its recent review of the movie under a weird and cryptic headline: ``Thou Shalt Not Like It."
So enjoying this film is a sin, in Newsweek's view, right up there with murder and adultery and coveting thy neighbor's gas grill? Not quite. The subhead hints at what they're really trying to say: ``Dan Brown's novel seemed tailor-made for the movies, and fans have longed to see it on the big screen. Be careful what you wish for."
And when, in the review, David Ansen calls the movie ``both overstuffed and underwhelming," all becomes clear. The headline is predicting the audience's response: What it says, in modern English, is ``You Will Not Like It." But in their rush to add a bit of Biblical-historical decoration, the writers lost their grip on grammar; what they meant to say was ``Thou Wilt Not Like It."
It's true that the subtleties of shall and will form a tangle that might baffle the canniest code-buster. Just 30 years ago, in Modern American Usage, Wilson Follett and Jacques Barzun optimistically devoted 20 pages to explaining why Americans should learn how to handle the pair. But the conventions are arcane: To cite a classic example, ``I shall drown and no one will save me" is properly a cry for help, while with the verbs transposed--"I will drown and no one shall save me"--you get an expression of suicidal resolve.
But even if Americans wanted to master their shalls and wills--and they haven't shown much interest for at least a century--these complexities are irrelevant to the Newsweek case. For ``Thou Shalt Not Like It" is unlikely to be a simple mistake; the editors who OK'd it must have known they were taking linguistic liberties.
After all, anyone who's heard of the Ten Commandments knows that they are orders. Different traditions may count them differently and interpret them differently and translate them differently. But whether the English words are ``Thou shalt not," ``Thou mayest not," ``You must not," or just ``Do not," these utterances have never been mistaken for statements about what will or won't happen. Those shalts are verbs of obligation, not prediction.
So what made Newsweek's editors think it was OK to pretend that ``Thou shalt not" could be employed to mean ``You won't"? I suspect a severe case of Ye Olde Gift Shoppe syndrome, the delusion that since nobody speaks Elizabethan English anymore, you can invent cute archaisms just by sticking obsolete verb endings and pronouns into your prose at random, like currants in a plum pudding.
This is harmless enough, in its place. Ye olde has been a joke for some 150 years, and today even people who know that ``ye" is just a faux-Old English ``the" are willing to be amused when they run across something like Ye Old Infocomme Shoppe, now open for business on Ye Newe Worlde Wide Webbe.
But is it wit or mere ignorance that tempts editors to publish stories about trophies and tank tops (The
Even if these are too trivial to bother about, you can hardly argue that ``Thou shalt not"--however archaic its form--is obsolete or obscure. And last time I checked, most US high schools were assigning at least one play by Shakespeare. Is it too much to ask that the kids who go on to edit national publications retain just the suspicion that all those sayeths and shalts were not mere random decorations?
Apparently it is. And so we have ``Thou Shalt Not Like It," a headline blighted not, probably, by accident but by some strange compound of arrogance, indifference, and ignorance. Maybe they thought it was good enough for a mediocre movie--but an audience of paying readers deserves better.
For four weeks' worth of The Word, visit boston.com/news/globe/ideas/freeman.
