“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.

Deponent verbs are the bane of the young Latin student’s existence. They take the form of the passive voice, but they have active meaning. And they are darned common: loquor, I speak; confiteor, I confess; morior, I die. Many of them are transitive verbs, and so they can take an object where the “look” of the verb wouldn’t suggest any. Why would the Romans have such a ridiculous thing?

These verbs, though, really do occupy a middle space between active and passive. They are like Greek verbs in the middle voice, in which the subject is both acting and acted upon. Consider these sentences:

I hurt the quarterback.
I was hurt by her remark.
I hurt.

Notice the differences between the three?  In the first, the true active voice, the subject is the agent of the verb. In the second, the true passive, the subject suffers the action of the verb. But in the third—what?  The subject is the agent, because he’s actively experiencing something named by the verb; but he suffers the verb. “I’m hurting” does not mean “I am walking around the neighborhood punching people,” but “I am feeling hurt; something is hurting me.”

Most of the deponent verbs are of this sort. Consider: morior, I die. I’m agent and patient at once. Consider: sequor, I follow. Again, I’m doing something; but something at the same time is being done to me: I am made to come after someone else. Consider: fieri, to become. That may be the definitive active-passive verb: when A becomes B, A is doing something: and something is being done to A.

Language isn’t always irrational, you see.

In the Beetle Bailey comic strip, the old addled General Halftrack has a dumb blonde secretary with really dangerous curves. Her name, of course, is Miss Buxley. Mort Walker was punning on the word buxom, which is now used only to describe a woman—and not every woman, either!

It wasn’t always so. In Paradise Lost, Milton describes Satan as flying through the buxom air. What could he have meant?

We need to return to the Old English: bugsam. The second part of the word is our suffix some: winsome, lonesome, handsome: it is the same suffix as the German –sam: langsam. It suggests that something is really characterized by what precedes: it’s the real deal. So what did the bug- mean?  Was something bugsam full of bugs?

No. The Old English verb bugan meant to bend. The old g’s at the ends of syllables often turned, by Middle English, into the semivowels w and y, so we have quite a few words in English that have to do with bending, that have those sounds at the end of a little word beginning with b: bow (both kinds), bough, bay, bight. Some people call a bay window a bow window: the idea is the same. German had many of the same words: so we end up with Yiddish bagel.

So something that is buxom is pliant, yielding—it gives way, it bends. But I trust Miss Buxley didn’t.

I like the word brethren. Its specialized use is to denote members of a solemn or sacred brotherhood, sometimes including women too. Nobody would now say, “I have three sisters and two brethren,” unless he was telling a joke; he’s a member of an order of priests, and there are three nuns next door. Brothers will do. But sometimes the older word is more powerful: “Brethren, let us now consider the matter before us.”

How did it get to be brethren, anyhow? The Old English word was brothor. It formed its plural in an old fashioned way: umlaut, a vowel-turn. The plural was brether. That happened because the ancient plural added a y-sound: *brothrj, the j pronounced like a hard y. Make that sound: say the old word ye. Say it loud. Your tongue is near the roof of your mouth, in front. The yeee sound influenced the vowel before it. (The sounds we pronounce alter nearby sounds all the time, doncha know?)  It turned the back vowel o into the corresponding front vowel e. German still forms plurals in this way. German Bruder = brother; but Brueder (spelled in German with two dots over the u, to signify that you are going to move that vowel up front: make as if to pronounce ooo but instead try to say eee, and you’ll have what the French spell as u, the Anglo Saxon monks spelled as y, and the Germans spell as u with two dots over it, the umlaut sign).

So how come we don’t say, “My brether”? Well, after a while, after one particular way of forming plurals took over all the rest, it just didn’t sound plural. So English speakers tacked on another old fashioned plural after the old fashioned plural. One ox, two oxen; one brother, two brethren. The same thing happened to the old plural in r, in the word childer (compare with German Kinder). We doubled the plural there too: children. The word brethren, then, is a little like brotherses—a little. Gollum would like that.

“Dust you are, and unto dust you shall return,” said the Lord God to Adam after the first sin. It’s a fine translation of the Hebrew, that dust; it suggests transience and insubstantiality. By the nineteenth century, in Britain at least, the word came to denote garbage of any sort. So Mr. Boffin in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend is called The Golden Dustman because he has inherited several enormous mounds of dust, apparently worth a great deal. The first time I read the book, I wondered—what on earth could be so valuable about dust?  We would now call it trash, as Shakespeare did. “Who steals my purse steals trash,” says the evil Iago, and that’s a phrase that strikes the British ear as decidedly quaint. The boy in the back row sniggers. “Trash?  Wha’ in all Lon’on is trash?”

The word is a distant cousin of ancient Greek thymos, meaning “spirit,” not in the sense of one’s soul, but rather what we’d call drive, ambition, fire. How do we get from there to here?  Grimm’s Law helps, as always. Grimm’s Law says that if you sprinkle fairy dust over your shoulder—no, it doesn’t say that. It relates the Proto-Indo-European th to Germanic d. In one of these essays I’ll explain why. So what shows up in Greek and Latin as th will reliably show up in Germanic as d. Hence all we have to account for now is the nasal consonant m.
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