ArcaMax

"The snowstorm cometh." "Thou goest into the night."

Modern writers and speakers occasionally dust off archaic forms like these to impart a mock heroic tone, to evoke a poetic mood or simply to have fun.

Deployed judiciously and sparingly, these linguistic fossils can imbue your prose with class or sass. Who among us hasn't tossed around an occasional "anon," "forsooth" or "perchance"?

But, alack! Methinks thou shouldst lug these creaky antiques hither from yonder attic only for the nonce. Seest what I mean?

If you do trot out these relics, be sure to follow the grammatical rules governing their use. If you're going to employ old-fashioned, mortise-and-tenon construction, your mortises must fit your tenons.

Archaic verb forms are especially tricky. Ignoring their proper endings brands you as a mewling moldwarp (an archaic term for "fool"). Here are two of the most common mistakes:

-- "Many icemen cometh": In Middle English, the suffix "-th" was added to verbs only in the third-person singular, e.g., "he goeth," "she hath," "he payeth," which today would be "he goes," "she has," "he pays."

Thus, in the title of Eugene O'Neill's play "The Iceman Cometh," the archaic verb form "cometh" is correctly used with the third-person singular noun "iceman," and no, it doesn't refer to a hockey player.

But many modern writers striving for archaic effect misapply the "-th" suffix to first-person or second-person singular nouns or to plural nouns, as in "I giveth," "you goeth" or "the icemen cometh." That's the equivalent of writing, "I gives," "you goes" or "the icemen comes."

Bryan Garner cites some examples of the erroneous use of "-th" in his "Dictionary of Modern American Usage": "The Pittsburgh Penguins giveth and taketh away"; "The bowls overfloweth"; "Perhaps I doth protest too much."

-- "The iceman goest": This error occurs when writers and speakers apply the suffix "-est," which was originally used only in the second-person singular, e.g., "thou goest," to the first-person or third-person singular, e.g., "I goest to the store," "he talkest too much." Garner cites these published gaffes: "Whither we goest into this nuclear night?" and "Whither Goest Standard C?"

But when archaisms are deployed carefully and cleverly, they can delight us. My favorite example came in a newspaper headline about a hapless hockey goalie. Alluding to the first lines of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the headline read, "He Stoppeth One of Three."

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Rob Kyff, a teacher and writer in West Hartford, Connecticut, invites your language sightings. His book, "Mark My Words," is available for $9.99 on Amazon.com. Send your reports of misuse and abuse, as well as examples of good writing, via email to WordGuy@aol.com or by regular mail to Rob Kyff, Creators Syndicate, 737 3rd Street, Hermosa Beach, CA 90254.

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