Factoid Friday: Thou didst not know?

According to my wife, I am full of it. It here refers to little bits of information that I collect in a manner similar to our house collecting pet hair - it gets shed in my vicinity and sticks around. So in thinking of regular features for the Micro Observer, Factoid Fridays came to mind, for two reasons: alliteration, and it is one of the few things I'm good at which might be interesting to the outside world.

This is a lot of introduction for a little factoid, so here it is.

The pronoun "thou" which has since died out everywhere (except some churches that believe biblical scholarship reached a pinnacle in 17th century England), was the informal way of addressing someone, compared with the more formal "you". I find this surprising because language generally becomes more sloppy as time goes on, and if I had to guess I would have chosen the informal version to win out. For those who know or remember studying other languages, "thou" would be comparable to "tu" in Spanish, French, and Italian, and "du" in German. "You" would be the counterpart to "usted", "vous", "Lei", and "sie", respectively.

So then for those of us who are familiar with church hymns (or scripture) in which God is referred to with "Thou", this is actually not a sign of respect, but rather of familiarity. Since I referred to King James earlier (King James Version), I'll pass along my favorite tidbit about him (it's a two-for-one Friday!). After Queen Elizabeth passed James the crown, the people of England found fun in joking about his effeminate nature: "Elizabeth was our king and now James is our queen."

On a different note, Heidi has suggested to me that the daily stills be tri-weekly stills, which doesn't quite have the same ring, but I believe she may have a point. I hope this does not push anyone to tears.