A Second Morsel of Grammar (and Thoughts)

SECOND PERSON.
  

.	Singular.	Plural.
Nom.	Thou,	you, ye,
Poss.	thy, thine,	your, yours,
Obj.	thee;	you, ye.

I'M FINICKY ABOUT using language properly in professional contexts — newspaper articles and non-self-published works, especially, and there I might even be particular about specifics like using 'data' as the plural form — only the plural form — of 'datum.' ('Professional contexts,' I think, must be stressed, since it would be rude and mean to scrutinize the merest text message of everybody and exclaim "'Tis an illiterate!" at every tiniest flaw, simply since I am personally so fastidious that I even purposely avoid contractions sometimes.)

But it's also grating when high-faluting language, ironically or not, is misused. That's why I think it's important to further the right kind of high-faluting language, and find it helpful to have this table at hand. (Besides, if I write historical tales for amusement, I want to have a scientifically right approach to the language of the time. But I wonder in this case how much the written and vernacular grammar changed from the Middle Ages to the 1860s, when the textbook that I am reading and where I found this grammar table was published. A 15th-century 'thou' might be quite different.)

**


Naturally I make mistakes of ostentatiousness, too; and perhaps there is an unnecessary element of elitism in the claiming of language by the ivory tower, which is also why I think that my education de-emphasized it. (I do still like the idea of thinking of language consciously, in particular contexts.) Thirdly, I think it's often true in my experience that anyone who tries to rectify someone else's orthographical mistakes or grammatical deviations, makes a mistake themselves. Maybe it's a part of Murphy's Law,* or maybe it's instant 'karma.'

Lastly, I think that rules of grammar generally are a half-lost cause, at least for a generation or two. With the retirement of copy-editors and subeditors from the newspaper and publishing industry structures, there may be fewer models of 'proper' language in perpetuity. Although, as I read somewhere, the anarchy of spelling presently can hardly be worse or really different at all from the anarchy that existed in Samuel Johnson's childhood. As I learn about old 'listed buildings' in parts of England, I've read lots of examples of different spellings for the names of towns and people — which might be an archivist's and historian's headache, but tends to be sorted out in the end — and maybe today's similar kind of chaos will be built into a temporary Tower again — if only for reasons of practicality — after all.

*****

Source: First Book in English Grammar, George Payn Quackenbos (1868). At Google Books.

[Revised May 12.] 
Edited to add: * (In fact, it is called 'Muphry's Law,' which I've learned in this comment thread.)