Speaking of Words
By MICHAEL FERBER
One of the many features of English that makes it weird compared to other European languages, and even to its West Germanic cousins, is its extravagant use of the word do. In German, it is true, its counterpart tun can be deployed in many similar ways: Er hat nichts zu tun, for example, means He has nothing to do, and Es sollte regnen, und das tat es means It was supposed to rain, and it did. These are instances of tun and do as both primary and auxiliary verbs. But English parts company with German, Dutch, and the other West Germanic languages in turning do into an all-purpose auxiliary. It must strike foreigners as very strange when they try to learn English as an adult, for they won’t have met anything quite like it anywhere else.
The Oxford English Dictionary lists 101 meanings in its entry for the verb do, fifteen of which are labelled “obsolete,” and most of them are uses as main or primary verbs. Its oldest meaning, now obsolete, was “put” or “place”; its root and meaning can be traced all the way back to Proto-Indo-European. Just about all that remains of that sense today is the pair don and doff, themselves archaic though still familiar in some contexts. Don is from do on, and doff is from do off. When we don our gay apparel at Christmas, we put it on, when we doff our hats to the ladies we put them, or take them, off.
Do can mean “give” or “bestow,” as in It did her credit. It can mean “perform,” as in Let’s do an experiment. It can mean “suffice,” as in This will do nicely, or when your school teacher cries out to her noisy class, That will do! You do the dishes or do your homework. Your car will do eighty miles per hour. A criminal did two years in prison, a friend did four years at Harvard. How do you do? How are you doing? I’m doing well. Let’s do lunch. He doesn’t do drugs. And so on, and on. It’s as if we reach for do when we can’t think of the right verb, rather like the noun thing, or whatchamacallit. Do can do anything.
Then there are phrasal forms with prepositions or adverbs. Do unto others… What can I do with this? Can I do without it? She used to do for the gentleman (that is, clean his rooms and prepare his food). We’re done for! They did him in. They did away with him. Then she did over her house.
Turning now to auxiliary uses, do is often used as a substitute for another verb that has just been said. She speaks French as well as you do. A nice quotation from 1938 reads, “A jerk not only bores you but pats you on the shoulder as he does so.” This substitutional use shows up in answers to questions: Do you eat fish? Yes, I do.
Do is often used as a polite imperative. Do sit down. Do behave yourself. Or even by itself: Shall I come by to see you? Do. Or Please do. The negative imperative, of course, is don’t: Don’t you dare. Don’t drink and drive. Don’t do that!
A once frequent use that we have forgotten about or associate with older poetry is the “periphrastic” auxiliary do. We might call it “pleonastic,” as it adds no meaning but tense. From the Book of Common Prayer (1549): “O Lord, which for our sake diddest fast forty days and forty nights.” Or this from 1804, and archaic then: “This being no more than the law doth appoint.” Such uses lingered on in poetry, as they were very handy for fitting into the meter. Hamlet asks, “How all occasions do inform against me.” Coleridge begins “Kubla Khan” this way: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure dome decree.” In his “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” Shelley writes, “Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrate / With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon.” You can see the usefulness of these meaningless verblets. Without “did” Coleridge would need another syllable in his first line, and if he then attached tense to “decree” he couldn’t have rhymed it with “sea.”
In this usage sometimes the word-order is inverted: “There did I see that low-spirited Swain” (Shakespeare), or “Never did mortal suffer what this man has suffered” (Hawthorne).
Now, of course, this empty do has become the emphatic do. I do love you used to mean simply I love you, but now it means I truly love you, or No matter how it seems, I love you. I really do.
The negative don’t or doesn’t has replaced not in declarative sentences. They knew him not has become They didn’t know him. I doubt not that God exists is now I don’t doubt that God exists. German still retains the older forms: ich weiss nicht means “I don’t know.” Tun has not intruded that far.
In a similar way we use do in questions and put it near the front. What think you? is now What do you think? (German still has Was denkst du?) Drink you wine? has become Do you drink wine? (German Trinkst du Wein?).
We also use do to answer questions, as we saw earlier, and we use it in tag-questions, as in You eat fish, don’t you? or He doesn’t do drugs, does he?
At risk of overdoing things, I’ll add one more use to the seemingly endless list, and that is done as a perfective auxiliary verb in American Southern dialects, and in Black English. I done told you is equivalent to I told you or I’ve told you, but it seems more emphatic. So with He done come a long way.
Why did do proliferate so wildly? Linguists don’t agree on an answer. Since German and the other West Germanic languages show a few auxiliary uses of their equivalent of do, perhaps Old English had some also, but that fact cannot explain the burst of new uses in early modern English. There seems to be no good theory as to why it has penetrated almost everywhere. But it seems that all the Germanic languages, long ago, long before one or two dialects became Proto-English, had an encounter with did (or its ancestor), and made it into the regular past-tense suffix –ed (German –t, Old Norse –ta). The ancestor of he loved her was in effect he love-did her. So the early modern pleonastic did, as in he did love her, repeats the ancient construction with a different word order but the same meaning.
I’ll conclude with a few nouns. Do as “a social event” has been current since about 1820: They held a big do at their penthouse. Since about 1600 it can mean “commotion” or “fuss,” and since 1900 it can mean “hair-do”: She made quite a do over her daughter’s new do. Since 1930 it can mean “excrement” or “poop,” especially from a dog (no doubt the alliteration has helped spread the phrase). Ado goes way back, as in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing, but now most common in without further ado. To-do is also old, more or less a synonym of ado. Re-do goes back to about 1950, while do-over is a little older.
But that will have to do.
I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu.
Michael Ferber moved to New Hampshire in 1987 to join the English Department at UNH, from which he is now retired. Before that he earned his BA in Ancient Greek at Swarthmore College and his doctorate in English at Harvard, taught at Yale, and served on the staff of the Coalition for a New Foreign Policy in Washington, DC. In 1968 he stood trial in Federal Court in Boston for conspiracy to violate the draft law, with the pediatrician Benjamin Spock and three other men. He has published many books and articles on literature, and has a deep interest in linguistics. He is married to Susan Arnold; they have a daughter in San Francisco.