grammaticality - "Till death do us part"


Every time I see this expression, I can't help thinking it's grammatically wrong. Is it grammatically acceptable? Why is it used extensively in this form?



Answer



The phrase is quite old: it was part of the Book of Common Prayer from 1662 (see http://www.eskimo.com/~lhowell/bcp1662/occasion/marriage.html). (For all I know, it could be older even than that.) But fixing it as the official language of a ceremony cemented the phrase in that form, even as the language changed around it. It's probably best viewed as idiomatic; you wouldn't want to say something else using the same form without a very good reason, but that particular phrase is a widely recognized feature of the language.


(Note, by the way, that the form in the BCP really was with "till" rather than "until"; this isn't surprising, since "till" is actually the older of the two words.)


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