Richard M. Nixon was the the 37th president of the United States. Before that he was Vice President under Dwight D. Eisenhower, a member of the house of representatives, a naval officer, lawyer and periodically during his life an author. He appeared on a few television shows including The Mickey Mouse Club, Laugh-In and various late night television comedy shows like Jack Paar or The Merv Griffin Show. When asked on (if I recall in 1968) one of said shows if he planned to announce that he

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My most recent story, Dawn, talks a great deal about the implications of politeness held by the words you and thou. While the story teaches about the distinction between the words, and talks about how thou is insulting, if one was a linguistic nerd, one might wonder: why did the pronoun thou exist in the first place? Indeed, why is it that people see thou as being a formal word, if it was, in fact, so

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A while ago I wrote a post about the T-V distinction, and mentioned how the Quakers used thou instead of you with everyone to be "humble", and because the King James Version of the Bible used it for addressing individuals in the second person. Everyone else found it overly familiar and super-rude because thou had historically

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