I really don't mean for this to sound prescriptive, but I have to comment on it somehow. Flipping through a magazine, I came across a full page ad for an upcoming episode of
CSI: Miami. Very dramatic, with David Caruso glaring out you out of one corner, and a blurry image of what appears to be someone important being dragged by paramedics towards the sliding side door of an ambulance. Wait, is that possible? And at the top, in intimidating sans-serif capital letters, is a nifty catch phrase:
Til Death do they part. Uh, is that possible too?
OK, here's why I'm not complaining. Traditional wedding vows contain a few phrases that are archaic in various ways, like
With this ring I thee wed. This one's archaic because of its use of the old second-person singular object pronoun and its placement of this object pronoun before the verb. At least as archaic is another phrase,
Til death do us part. Again, there is an object pronoun before the main verb, but in this case,
do shows up, in what appears to be a subjunctive. Wedding vows being as ritualistic as they are, I am not surprised that these phrases aren't parsed like non-ritualistic language. I also believe most of us know what both these phrases mean and can paraphrase them, but probably will stumble over novel productions with a parallel structure, like
With this hose he it watered and
Til syntax do me bore.
Again, I'm not complaining. Weird, memorized old structures. Also, subjunctives. We don't really use many subjunctives at all, probably because they look like indicatives. In the present tense, subjunctives take no overt agreement, so they only look different in 3rd person singular for all verbs except
be, whose subjunctive is invariantly
be and thus distinct from all its present indicatives (am, are, is). I'll bet very few people use any present subjunctives productively other than in memorized constructions. One notable example is the
shed in
God shed his grace on thee,
discussed a while back by Geoff Pullum on Language Log. Another is the use of
be in learned-sounding phrases like
Be that as it may,
So be it, and in listing options like
I'll drink any cola, be it coke, or pepsi, or RC. Oh, and the
b in
goodbye (<
God be with you). And the example that started this,
til death do us part, where
do takes no 3rd person agreement - an indicative would be
death does us part.
On the other hand, some people do use past subjunctives, like invariant
were, as in
if I were there, I would have said something or
Were I to do it again, I would have been more careful. Note the inversion in the second example, which also shows up with past subjunctive
had, as in
Had I known better, I wouldn't have stayed so long. But again, look how the subjunctives look like indicatives.
The functions of subjunctives are more typically carried out with auxiliaries, like
May your birthday be bright,
Let there be light, and
Let it be known, or with conditional markers, like
if or
whether, as in the prescriptively frowned-upon
If I was ... construction.
Anyway, we have other ways of expressing what subjunctives express, in past tense and especially in present tense. So the fact that the do in
Til death do us part is subjunctive is no doubt not obvious to fluent English speakers. Neither, evidently, is the fact that the subject in this SOV phrase is
death.
Add to this the fact that, though we don't know how to parse this phrase, we know vaguely what it means: "we'll be together til one of us dies". So it's really easy to think that
us (despite its object form) is the subject of the sentence - and hey, it also precedes the main verb. To complete the puzzle, it's also easy to parse
do as an auxiliary that agrees with
us, since
death do looks weird as a subject-verb combo. Just like Ray Charles
parsed shed as a past indicative, and made it emphatic by embellishing it to
done shed.
So ultimately, if you write ads for CBS and you love wordplay, and you want to allude to the wedding vow phrase
Til death do us part, you'll switch out the
us and put in some other pronoun - but a subject pronoun. Voila,
Til death do they part. The rest of us recognize the phrase, and immediately think of the paraphrase, yielding "they'll be together til one of them dies". Job's done, great ad, let's go out after work. But look at the actual phrase
Til death do they part - since
they is clearly the subject now,
til death is an adjunct, and it maps to an intepretation of "they'll be apart til one of them dies". Maybe the other's dead already, and they'll finally be together in the afterlife.
Like I said, I'm not complaining. Not complaining that basically nobody uses present subjunctives in English. But if your job as an ad writer is to manipulate language and use wordplay, maybe you should know what you're messing with. It's like a mechanic deciding it would be funny to fill your radiator with gasoline.
Coincidentally, the magazine that had this ad was
Us.
