Thou

This ancient pronoun could be used in various insulting ways in the past. Originally the common form used in addressing a person in Anglo-Saxon, it has now been replaced by you . During the Middle English period (1100–1500) the convention developed whereby thou was used to address an intimate or an inferior. Although the general and literary uses of thou have died out, the form is still used in some British dialects by parents when addressing children, and familiarly between equals. But in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary , “in all other cases considered rude.” Hence the use of the verbal form “to thou” a person, meaning to show disrespect, as in “Avaunt caitiff, dost thou thou me! I am come of good kin [family]” (from the play Hickscorner , ca. 1530, l. 149). At the trial of Sir Walter Raleigh for treason in 1603, the attorney general, Sir Edward Coke, harangued Raleigh insultingly: “for I thou thee, thou Traitor!” (Hargreave State Trials , I, 216). The usage is an important indicator of tone and relationship in Elizabethan drama, showing affection, but also contempt, as in Caliban’s speech to Ariel: “Thou liest, thou lying monkey thou” ( Tempest III ii 52). Consequently, when the Quakers started to use thou in the mid-seventeenth century as an expression of friendship and equality, it was frequently interpreted as a sign of disrespect. Samuel Pepys noted with amusement in his Diary (January 11, 1664): “She thou’d him all along,” referring to a Quaker lady addressing King Charles II.