Janfriend said:

Thanks!!! I actually use it and know the essence of the meaning but it just seems so weird.


M

MIGUELGOMEZ said:

Better explanation. It's basically "Believe me"

It’s a puzzling way of speaking because we don’t use English in that way any more. My knowledge of formal grammar being more than a bit shaky, I went for information to Professor Geoffrey Pullum, co-author of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, the 1800-page volume that is the standard work.

Because English doesn’t add endings to words to show how they are being used in a sentence, word order is crucially important. Today, virtually all sentences that make a statement have to be put in the order subject-verb-object (SVO): “The man pats the dog”. That makes clear who is doing what to whom. “The dog pats the man” has a quite different sense.

At one time, however, English used to allow verb-subject-object (VSO) in certain situations, mainly imperatives. The 1611 King James version of the Bible has many examples: “And he went out to meet Asa, and said unto him, Hear ye me”; “Ask me of things to come concerning my sons, and concerning the work of my hands command ye me”; “For thus saith the Lord unto the house of Israel, Seek ye me, and ye shall live”; and “Lay ye them in two heaps at the entering in of the gate until the morning.” And here’s G Herbert Temple in 1633: “Come ye hither all, whom wine Doth define” and another writer in 1695: “Mark ye me; that’s holy stuffe”. These days, we only see them in old writings or fossil expressions like:

Mind you, she’s very intelligent.
This was the fifth time, mark you.
Oh, come ye back...
In every case, you or ye is the subject, but it comes after the verb it’s attached to. Believe you me belongs in this set. It seems odd to us today because English language rules forbid us to construct such expressions. We can’t naturally say “Take you care of yourself, now!” for example.

An oddity, however, is that believe you me is relatively modern. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first example is from 1926. I’ve only been able to improve on that by six years — it turns up in the USA in 1919 as the title of a novel by Nina Wilcox Putnam. For further help here, I turned to Benjamin Zimmer, at the University of Pennsylvania, an ace at researching historical word usage. He tells me that there are earlier examples, but that nearly all of them are in verse, where the phrasing is useful for scansion. He has been able to find only three examples in prose from the nineteenth century.

What seems to have happened is that a once-standard phrase that had been lurking in the language for generations suddenly became much more popular and widespread around the 1920s. What we have here is a revitalised fossil, a semi-invented anachronism.

I want to say "Come ye hither." all the time. It's very cool.


M

CHIC0 said:

1. Karma
2. Independent Thought!
3. Love
4. Nature
5. Beer
6. Great Sex
7. Masturbation
8. Reading
9. Music
10 Love



The order may change according to where I am in life!!!

somewhat...karma
reincarnation
aliens
other planets with people like us
spirit guides
angels
paranormal stuff
psychics

unlucky7 said:

I need clarification. What someone believes in and what they believe are two different things. Are you asking for both?

Janfriend said:

as most people did; answer however you want.

wether you believe in ghosts, unicorns, ETs, or your personal mantra, spiritual belief, etc... or both

CHIC0 said:

I believe in 2 apple pies for a dollar
I believe I am a fraggle
I believe music is infallible
I believe Shrek is a black man
I believe Kermit and Ms Piggy are both gay and their relationship is a front
I believe in Stacy Ferguson
I believe lucid dreams are real
I believe there is life (somewhere) on other planets
I believe evil forces try to stop us from succeeding
I believe the concept of fate is a way to make us rationalize what's happening to us
I believe we are all owned by giant corporate greed and the superrich one percent
I believe we all are pawns in the big chess game of life