I noticed, in a few Herman Wouk novels, that the characters often use the interjection Ye gods! as an interjection. My .mother, from the same generation, used to say it until about 1980. Judging from The Caine Mutiny, (in addition to Mother), it seemed to be more current among the middle and upper classes than among the lower echelons; for example, the college educated ship’s officers would say it, but not the sailors. Willie’s girlfriend says it, IIRC, but she too has had at least a partial college education though her background is humble.
So I’m here to ask: (1) what was the origin of this expression? How did it become current there and then? Was there some edition of Ovid’s Metamorphosis that virtually every college student had to study back then? And (2), have you heard the expression used by people you know? If so, what is their age and background?
The OED says the usage comes from Shakespeare, though the first cite of “Ye Gods” is from Boswell (and looking at the cites, I don’t quite understand why they think it comes from Shakespeare at all).
Note that in Medieval times, “Ye” was pronounced “The.” It wasn’t even a separate word: when movable type came to England, it was missing some letter, notably the thorn (“Þ,” which had the “th” sound). Early printers tried to use “y” (which looks a bit like it) as a substitute and thus you did have “ye” showing up for a time. Later, people saw the “ye” and assumed it was pronounced the way we would pronounce it now.
Certainly the assumption would have been that the speaker as well as the listener/reader did not actually believe in multiple gods,* so no blasphemy would be possible, whereas carelessly invoking the name of the “real” deity would arguably be breaking one of the Ten Commandments (“You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.”)
Shakespeare is said to have used Jove in place of God in some of his plays to get around a blasphemy law.
A 19th-century ye gods: “Would he not far rather lay him down lengthwise along the line of the equator; yea, ye gods! go down to the fiery pit itself, in order to keep out this frost?” (Melville, Moby-Dick, 1851)
For Jove’s sake, let us not get into a debate about the trinity.
I’m missing something. Why does the OED consider this a precursor of “ye gods”? Surely “the Gods” was itself a common enough pairing with no connection to the mock heroic.
Some word-type-scholar guys seem to have an almost-perverse desire to attribute everything in modern English to Shakespeare, but I think RealityChuck expressed the same doubt you have.
By the way, I found a reference to the blasphemy statute I referred to above (Online 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica), which also explains such odd-sounding oaths as “gad,” “zounds” and “'sblood.”
ETA: The venerable OED seems to be conflating ye/the (“a Dish fit for the Gods”) with ye/you (“Oh! ye Gods! How you are to be envied”).
It should be mentioned that this only hold true for things like “Ye Olde Shoppe” or “Ye Gods,” phrases like “Hear ye, hear ye” have a different origin and are pronounced how they’re spelled (AFAIK at least).
That’s where I first heard it (assuming you are referencing “The Music Man”), and I’ve been using it ever since as a sort of general purpose anachronistic exclamation…TRM (I think it’s a swell thing to say)
I’m confused about that myself, hence my comment when I quoted. If you squint at the definition, it’s possible to see tracks of logic (it’s about a feast, and Ye Gods was about a feast), but I find that very tenuous. Maybe the OED just liked Shakespeare.
Correct. “Ye” was a legitimate variation of “You” that was actually part of the language of the time (and I believe it’s still used in some dialects). “Ye” for “The” is a misunderstanding.
Ye gods is no more blasphemous than by Jove, and both expressions (and many more such) were natural to generations who knew the Greek and Roman classics as well as they knew the Bible. As has been mentioned the expression goes back centuries in English.
