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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