“The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” says Queen Gertrude in Hamlet, watching a play wherein a woman professes, in the most fulsome terms, utter devotion to her husband the king, two minutes before the king’s brother will poison him by pouring poison into his ear, and four minutes before that devoted woman will marry her brother-in-law. Oops!
What does the word mean? And why is it methinks? I imagine a Huron queen watching the same play, and struggling with the foreign language. “Me think the lady doth protest too much.”
It’s methinks because it’s a compound of the dative pronoun me and an impersonal verb, thinks. That verb isn’t what you think it is. The Old English verb for think was thencan: German denken. But what if something seems funny to you? What if it makes you think? That causative verb had a different vowel in it: it was thyncan: German duenken. The Germans don’t use that verb much these days, but when they did use it, it was just as in olden English: Mir duenkt es graesslich, It seems ghastly to me; methinks it ghastly. In Old English the phrase was me thyncath: It seems to me.
So that is what the s is doing there. It’s just the third person singular ending on the impersonal verb: it seems. Methinks = it seems to me. Latin speakers did the same thing with their verb videri, to be seen. It also means it seems: visus sum = it seemed to me. Cf. English: it looked that way to me.
December 14th, 2012 | 11:20 am
What is even funnier is “methought!” which I have never seen used…
And while all the Latin derived languages provide for this reference to the person (it seems *to me*), in Spanish, for example, people even say: To me, it seems to me that… :-)
A mí me parece que…
December 14th, 2012 | 2:24 pm
I feel much gratitude toward Professor Esolen for his wonderful writings in defense of faith, sanity, and everything that belongs to civilization. But I wish to object, I hope not uncharitably or pointlessly, to some of his remarks in these “Word of the Day” pieces. “brether” is not the Old English plural of “brother”. There were probably three different basic forms in use among the Anglo-Saxons, of which only one, the rarely attested “brethre”, had umlaut, and it had an inflectional ending (-e). How does “sequor” mean “I am made to come after”? I don’t follow! “visus sum” doesn’t mean “it seemed to me”, except insofar as something like “visus sum mihi felem videre” may be translated “it seemed to me that I …” (“I tawt I taw a puddy tat”). Otherwise “visum est mihi” would correspond to “it seemed to me”. I’m sure Professor Esolen, an accomplished translator, knows this. But getting words right is worth some care; or why write about ‘em?
December 14th, 2012 | 10:57 pm
Well, that’s what I get for writing from memory, without the book nearby. “Brether” is dative singular, “gebrothra” the most typical plural. But somewhere along the line we conformed to the German-style Brueder, and then added the second plural sign. I’ll hit the OED. As to the Latin — “videor” is typically used in Cicero to mean “it seems to me”. I’ll check that too. I’ll look again for the perfect. The point about “sequor” is that we can look at the action from the point of view of the follower, or from the one who is followed; to “follow someone” is not the same sort of thing as to “kick someone,” since one might say that the follower is both agent and patient, which is not the case with the kicker.
December 14th, 2012 | 10:58 pm
Heather — yes, we have “methought”: for instance in Caliban’s famous speech:
Methought the heavens opened and would show riches / Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked / I cried to dream again.
December 14th, 2012 | 11:42 pm
Just checked, Rob: The weird construction “visus sum” = “it seemed to me”, “I thought,” is all over the place in classical Latin: “Audire vocem visa sum,” says a woman in Terence, literally: I was seen to hear a voice, but really, I thought I heard a voice, It seemed to me I heard a voice. It’s odd, but it’s very common.
The thing about “brother” is true of Old Norse and Mercian: the old Teutonic *brothriz > *brothri > ON braethr, Mercian broether. So Old English was the odd man out, with the plural form without the vowel change, but the northern forms seem to have won out in the early Middle Ages, and then the double plural was added. Anyway, the point I was making was that it was a double plural, like “children”. I remembered correctly about the umlaut, but had forgotten that it showed up everywhere but in southern England (where it should have showed up, if it had followed the example of all the other umlauts).
Thanks for your kind words, and for giving me the heads-up! I started writing these far away from my books, in Canada, on sabbatical ….
December 15th, 2012 | 2:29 am
Tony wrote: “Heather — yes, we have “methought”: for instance in Caliban’s famous speech…”
I guess I wasn’t clear. I wasn’t saying no one had ever used it – then the word wouldn’t exist, would it?
I meant that I had never seen anyone use it today – as opposed to “methinks,” that I do see people use now and then.
December 15th, 2012 | 7:42 pm
Heather: It may be, too, that “methought” is really not the right form, either! It was built by analogy from “methinks,” but OE thencan (think) had its preterite thohte, while OE thyncan had instead thuhte, which “should” have ended up sounding “thoot” in Modern English, or even “thight,” but people even then were constantly mixing the two verbs up …
December 16th, 2012 | 1:12 pm
“Methoot” sounds very funny for today!
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