What means this?

When is an error not strictly so?

by Laurie James Bines

This question, in some form or another, gets asked in my classroom at least once a term. It’s a classic error that should be quickly corrected, but secretly, it is also one of my favourite things to hear as a teacher, for two reasons:

1. While it is unorthodox (I try to be very careful with the word wrong, even if most would use it here), “What means this” demonstrates application of modular logic; the student has observed, consciously or not, that the interrogative construction in English places the verb before the subject. They are constructing fresh language! Sure, what they don’t know (or have nervously forgotten while speaking a foreign tongue at full speed) is that we only do this with a very exclusive (and poorly-defined) subset of verbs, but this is a knowledge problem – easily solved. At the end of the day, I believe that a student with good logic and poor knowledge has much greater prospects than another with the inverse attributes.

2. “What means this?” is also the title, and recurring motif, of my favourite poem, by Tudor-era genius Thomas Wyatt.This is precisely why I avoid the word ‘wrong’. How can I reconcile these two contradictory truths: that this is both terrible and brilliant English? 

Indeed, a great many of English’s most typical mistakes from foreign speakers can actually be characterised as something having gone out of fashion, rather than an alien anomaly; it’s not that the thing isn’t correct, but that it was correct once. What’s the Occam’s Razor explanation for this particular case? “What means this?” Could it be that the auxiliary verbs were once a broader group that previously included now-regular verbs like ‘Mean’? Or perhaps it was a completely irrelevant classification and we simply used to place the first verb in a clause before the subject to create interrogatives, regardless of form? 

Does it really matter? After all, whatever archaic auxiliarity-logic that we observe at play in “What means this?” survives intact in analogous phrases such as “How dare you?” – a technically-identical construction that no modern English speaker would ever have an issue with.

There is concrete precedent for all kinds of classic “mistakes”, if you look back far enough:

DOUBLE (or even TRIPLE) NEGATIVES

“Thou hast spoken no word all this while, nor understood none neither, sir.”

-William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost

SUBJECT OBJECT VERB CONSTRUCTIONS

“By mountains where King Arthur dreams, By Penmaen Mawr defiant, Llareggub Hill a molehill seems, A pygmy to a giant.”

-Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood

UNORTHODOX ADVERBIAL SYNTAX

“That coat nothing becomes you, Cromwell.”

-Hilary Mantel, Bring Up The Bodies

All of this serves not to reveal a particular truth, but to pose a question: as language learners ourselves, when we inevitably make a mistake – say something wrong – is it of greater comfort, or utility, to us, to be told that the nature of our error was not that it was incorrect, but simply that what we said was unfashionable, or unorthodox, that we were, perhaps, a couple of centuries late in saying it?