Thou shalt not vandalize verbs

är rubriken under vilken Jan Freeman skriver i The Boston Globe om användandet av äldre engelska verbformer och hur man sällan bemödar sig om att få dem rätt.

So what made Newsweek's editors think it was OK to pretend that "Thou shalt not" could be employed to mean "You won't"? I suspect a severe case of Ye Olde Gift Shoppe syndrome, the delusion that since nobody speaks Elizabethan English anymore, you can invent cute archaisms just by sticking obsolete verb endings and pronouns into your prose at random, like currants in a plum pudding.