"God Bless America"
Dec. 9th, 2005 02:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellowI've been thinking about Marvin Gaye's version of the song "God Bless America", and it's provided me with an excuse for some linguistic ruminations. If you're a grammar freak like I am, much of what I'm going to say will be familiar, but bear with me; I think there's something interesting going on.
The language of "God Bless America" is rather formal, and distinctly old-fashioned (not to say archaic). Among other things, it uses the subjunctive mood extensively, in, e.g., the first line of the chorus: America, America, God shed his grace on thee. The specific use of the subjunctive here is the optative, expressing a wish or hope. Though the subjunctive is rapidly vanishing from vernacular English, the optative use is alive and well, at least in the second person: "Have a nice day!" "Sleep well!" (In form, it looks just like the imperative, but in meaning it's clearly different; your wish is not your command!) In the third person, it's mostly gone, except in a handful of frozen phrases, mostly curses and benedictions: "God damn you!" or "God bless you!" This is the form used here, still unfrozen.
Now, the verbal shape the present subjunctive usually takes is simply the root of the verb; in other words, it looks just like the present indicative, except that in the third person singular it doesn't take the ending "-s". (That's the written ending, mind you; the situation in spoken English is more complex. Cf. my comments on the English plural here.) That is, it's "God shed", not "God sheds". But there's a complicating factor.
The past tense of most verbs in (written) English is formed by adding the suffix "-ed". (Again, the spoken situation is more complex, in a way parallel to the "-s" situation.) There is no variation of person or number; "I/you/he/she/we/they walked". Unfortunately, "shed" isn't one of those "most verbs"; its past tense is identical in form to its root - which brings us to Marvin Gaye's version of the song.
Gaye begins the chorus (on at least one repetition) with the words America, America, God done shed his grace on thee. In Gaye's variant of English - at least, the one he's using in this song - "done Verbed" is the standard way of expressing the perfect or past perfect; in other words, he means what another might express as "God has shed his grace on thee."1 The obvious interpretation is that Gaye has made a mistake - that he has misinterpreted a present subjunctive form as a past (or perfect) indicative. The only reason this is possible is because of the odd behavior of "shed".
At this point, it would be tempting to begin a lament on the decay of the language that makes this misinterpretation possible. I'm not going to. The formal subjunctive, for the most part, doesn't do anything that can't be done equally well, and with almost equal brevity, in other ways; English isn't really losing any of its expressiveness by dropping the subjunctive. The only time it raises problems comes when people who do not use the form face older texts which do, but that's part and parcel of the general problem of change. A century, a century and a half ago, words like "nice" and "nondescript" had meanings decidedly different from their common meanings today, and there is no more reason to complain about the loss of the subjunctive than there is to bemoan the changes in meaning of those words. (Or no less; there are, of course, people who do complain about the change in "nice". I haven't heard anyone defending the old meaning of "nondescript", though!)
By the way, there's another interpretation of Gaye's version, rather kinder to him: that he knew what he was doing, and was deliberately recasting the song. What was an expressible hope in the late 19th century could be regarded as an achieved fact in the late 20th - and thereby, perhaps, an admonishment: you've been blessed, and ought to live in grateful recognition of the fact - to strive to deserve it. (Gaye was certainly not blind to America's flaws!) But going in that direction leads away from the realm of linguistics, so I'll go no further for now. Later, maybe.
There's only one thing that bothers me about all of this. The next line of the chorus is And crown thy good with brotherhood - which is not vulnerable to the same (mis?)interpretation as the first line. Unfortunately, I don't have a copy of Gaye's version of the song handy, so I don't know how he sang that line. Might be revealing...
1. Let me take a moment to sing the praises of the Oxford Guide to World English, a wonderful source for anyone interested in all the different variants of the language.
The language of "God Bless America" is rather formal, and distinctly old-fashioned (not to say archaic). Among other things, it uses the subjunctive mood extensively, in, e.g., the first line of the chorus: America, America, God shed his grace on thee. The specific use of the subjunctive here is the optative, expressing a wish or hope. Though the subjunctive is rapidly vanishing from vernacular English, the optative use is alive and well, at least in the second person: "Have a nice day!" "Sleep well!" (In form, it looks just like the imperative, but in meaning it's clearly different; your wish is not your command!) In the third person, it's mostly gone, except in a handful of frozen phrases, mostly curses and benedictions: "God damn you!" or "God bless you!" This is the form used here, still unfrozen.
Now, the verbal shape the present subjunctive usually takes is simply the root of the verb; in other words, it looks just like the present indicative, except that in the third person singular it doesn't take the ending "-s". (That's the written ending, mind you; the situation in spoken English is more complex. Cf. my comments on the English plural here.) That is, it's "God shed", not "God sheds". But there's a complicating factor.
The past tense of most verbs in (written) English is formed by adding the suffix "-ed". (Again, the spoken situation is more complex, in a way parallel to the "-s" situation.) There is no variation of person or number; "I/you/he/she/we/they walked". Unfortunately, "shed" isn't one of those "most verbs"; its past tense is identical in form to its root - which brings us to Marvin Gaye's version of the song.
Gaye begins the chorus (on at least one repetition) with the words America, America, God done shed his grace on thee. In Gaye's variant of English - at least, the one he's using in this song - "done Verbed" is the standard way of expressing the perfect or past perfect; in other words, he means what another might express as "God has shed his grace on thee."1 The obvious interpretation is that Gaye has made a mistake - that he has misinterpreted a present subjunctive form as a past (or perfect) indicative. The only reason this is possible is because of the odd behavior of "shed".
At this point, it would be tempting to begin a lament on the decay of the language that makes this misinterpretation possible. I'm not going to. The formal subjunctive, for the most part, doesn't do anything that can't be done equally well, and with almost equal brevity, in other ways; English isn't really losing any of its expressiveness by dropping the subjunctive. The only time it raises problems comes when people who do not use the form face older texts which do, but that's part and parcel of the general problem of change. A century, a century and a half ago, words like "nice" and "nondescript" had meanings decidedly different from their common meanings today, and there is no more reason to complain about the loss of the subjunctive than there is to bemoan the changes in meaning of those words. (Or no less; there are, of course, people who do complain about the change in "nice". I haven't heard anyone defending the old meaning of "nondescript", though!)
By the way, there's another interpretation of Gaye's version, rather kinder to him: that he knew what he was doing, and was deliberately recasting the song. What was an expressible hope in the late 19th century could be regarded as an achieved fact in the late 20th - and thereby, perhaps, an admonishment: you've been blessed, and ought to live in grateful recognition of the fact - to strive to deserve it. (Gaye was certainly not blind to America's flaws!) But going in that direction leads away from the realm of linguistics, so I'll go no further for now. Later, maybe.
There's only one thing that bothers me about all of this. The next line of the chorus is And crown thy good with brotherhood - which is not vulnerable to the same (mis?)interpretation as the first line. Unfortunately, I don't have a copy of Gaye's version of the song handy, so I don't know how he sang that line. Might be revealing...
1. Let me take a moment to sing the praises of the Oxford Guide to World English, a wonderful source for anyone interested in all the different variants of the language.
