Andros Townsend has had a hair transplant , me thinks.

has resisted writing a single post on the Ross McCormack thread !!!

Methinks that Bakary hath a very strange hairstyle.

Edited by johnno42000 (30 Jan 2018 10.06pm)

'Lies to the masses as are like fly's to mollasses...they want more and more and more'

Forsooth 'tis dawning on me that we showeth too much respect to our opponents, notwithstanding and not withholding all and yet nothing of our fragilities.

Methinks the irksome wretch, Moyes be his name, casts a long cloud upon our mighty vessel.

Edited by johnno42000 (30 Jan 2018 10.18pm)

'Lies to the masses as are like fly's to mollasses...they want more and more and more'

me thinks you need to get laid

This was once a quality forum....

Who made you the Nigel who polices sayings on the hol?

Vive le Roy!

"Methinks" is a construction which comes from the OE verb thyncan, which didn't mean to think, but to seem or appear. To think in Old English was a quite separate verb thencan. The difference between the two verbs is the vowel, y versus e, a change termed an Ablaut grade. The Ablaut in this case denotes causation, i.e. thencan "think" - thyncan "cause (someone) to think", i.e. to appear or seem to someone.

English now (since Chaucer's time) uses word order rather than changes to words themselves to identify the grammatical relationships between words in a clause and we now expect the first word in a sentence, preceding the verb, to be the subject. "Methinks" began to be read as "I think" because whatever goes first and before the verb is taken to be the subject.

Use of this form today generally derives from its use in Shakespeare's Hamlet, "Methinks the lady doth protest too much". Shakespeare also used the preterite "methought" (e.g. in Macbeth). Were it not for the continuing popularity of this playwright the forms would have passed into history.

Making of causatives using the ablaut grade is preserved in Eng. "sit" / "seat" (to cause to sit), and cognate Ger. sitzen (to sit) and setzen (to seat). Such pairings were ubiquitous in Proto-Germanic.

Edited by chateauferret (31 Jan 2018 2.41am)

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The Ferret
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