Author: Jonathon Owen
Jonathon Owen
Jonathon Owen is an editor and linguist who blogs at arrantpedantry.com.
Have you ever wondered what’s up with the weird word “methinks”? Why does it use an object for a subject (“Me thinks”), and why does it have an -s like a third-person verb (“thinks”) even though it seems to be in the first person? The answers are weirder than you may think! But to find those answers, we’ll need to take a little dive into Old English, the form of English that was spoken between about 500 and 1100 AD. Not the Verb You’re Thinking Of Old English had two different but related verbs, “þencan,” meaning “to think,” and “þyncan,”…