till death do us part

20:18 Oct 4, 2017 

but I can't resist the temptation to mention that when I was small I used to understand 'till death us do part' to mean 'until death we are going to part' (we will live separately until we die). I couldn't understand why the phrase formed part of a marriage ceremony.

It never occurred to me that I had misunderstood the meaning!

05:46 Oct 4, 2017 

"[...] it is time to seek the LORD, till he come and rain righteousness on you" (Hosea 10:12, in the King James version [1604-11]).

Come is subjunctive; indicative would have been cometh or comes at this time.

Here is Matthew Poole's commentary on this:
"Till he come; seek with patience and faith until he doth, as certainly he will, come; for this passage is a virtual or implicit promise that God will come to them if they seek him"
http://biblehub.com/commentaries/hosea/10-12.htm

Poole, writing in the 1670s, still uses "doth" as the indicative, though "does" was common in Southern English by then, and still uses periphrastic do, now obsolete in this context. But the main point I want to emphasise is that he says until he doth come (indicative), even though until he do come or until he come (subjunctive) were still standard when referring to future action. Poole wants to emphasise that God's coming, though future, is real, not hypothetical, so he uses the indicative, doth, after "until". So this illustrates why the subjunctive was normally used after till/until.

05:15 Oct 4, 2017 

This is standard 16th-century Southern English.
- The correct form of this phrase, the one that appears in the Book of Common Prayer, is "till death us do part", not "till death do us part", as it is often misquoted.
http://www.eskimo.com/~lhowell/bcp1662/occasion/marriage.htm...
Placing the object pronoun between the auxiliary do and the verb would not have been grammatically correct. The word order, with the object before the verb (instead of "till death do part us"), is perhaps consciously archaic; object-before-verb had been common in Old and Middle English.
- Use of periphrastic do here is typical of the 16th century. It is not emphatic. "Till death part us" could have been said.
- "Do" is subjunctive, as Phil says. The subjunctive was normally used after a number of conjunctions, including "till" or "until", when the action expressed was understood to be hypothetical or unreal (in this case, because it lies in the future).
- The indicative form at this time would have been "doth", not "does". "Doth" was gradually displaced by Northern English "does" from the late 16th century.

23:17 Oct 3, 2017 

As regards idioms, by their very nature, they originate with people. In other words, they are not quotes from the Classics, or excerpts from the literati, but folk wisdom, expressed in the language of the common folk. This is why idioms are often so colourful.

22:58 Oct 3, 2017