Shall we try that again?

By R.L.G. | NEW YORK

THERE ARE quite a few defenders of shall out there, if the comments on yesterday's post are anything to go by. Let me try to clear up some confusions, at least about my own position, and about the history of shall and will.

First, of course I wouldn't "ban" shall or anything else. Regular readers know we're not big fans of bans here at Johnson, just the occasional bit of ridicule. Nor would I try to ridicule out of existence shall in one sense: in "Shall we dance?" must and will won't do. Third, since famous fixed bits of archaic English have a way of sticking around, I have no intention of singing "We Will Overcome" at my next civil-rights march any more than I will request "Just A Closer Walk With You" at a jazz funeral.

The next issue is that English and American usage differs on shall. Many in England are still taught that shall must be used for the simple future in declarative sentences when the subject is the first person: "I shall turn 36 in July." Will in the first person, under this rule, means volition. (And will and shall are swapped for the other persons.) Some educated and careful speakers in England observe the rule in speech and writing. But many do not, and never have. "Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage" gives a useful three-page history of the issue. Around the time of John Wycliffe's translation of the Bible from the Vulgate into English, roughly 1384, shall had a sense of obligation, and will of volition. Both were used for futurity. But Wycliffe, and some Latin teachers, chose will to translate the Latin volo. This left shall as the default for futurity in certain scholarly circles. The "rule" that shall and will should be used as described above was set down as such in the 17th century by John Wallis, a bishop.

But Merriam-Webster's survey of literary and scholarly examples from the centuries before and after Wallis found little regularity. Shall and will in the traditional rule's sense are "misused" by Bacon, Hobbes, Dryden, Defoe, Johnson, Bowell, Byron, Dickens, Lewis Carroll and others. Meanwhile, the Scots and Irish flouted the rule more regularly still, as Americans did and do. MWDEU's conclusion: "the traditional rules about shall and will do not appear to have described real usage of these words precisely at any time, although there is no question that they do describe the usage of some people some of the time, and that they are more applicable in England than elsewhere."

That's enough for a Friday post. On Monday, we'll take up shall, must, will and legal meaning, closer to the heart of many of yesterday's comments.

Nerdish coda: Germanic cousins to English have some of the same issues; skal and vil can both imply futurity in Danish. Skal is a little more neutral, but can also imply obligation, while vil can be used for both present and futurity, meaning to want in the present, and will [with a strong hint of volition] in the future.