So that’s that: merry is part of the verb phrase rest you merry, or if you wish, part of the set expression God rest you merry. 31 ‘ Rest you merry, fair master,’ said the youth. 14 Rest you merry, Master Carpenter-take a draught of the ‘Squire’s liquor, and welcome, you shall swim in it, when all is over.ġ823 Scott Quentin Durward I. 26 Help me into my Bed rest you merry, Gentlemen.ġ774 J. 57 Rest you faire good signior, Your worship was the last man in our mouthes.ġ663 A. 83 Rest you merrie.ġ600 Shakespeare Merchant of Venice i. 342 God rest you merry both, and God be your guide.1597 Shakespeare Romeo & Juliet i. ed.), Aue, bee thou gladde: or ioyfull, as the vulgare people saie Reste you mery.ġ568 U. Their list of citations should be enough to convince anyone that that’s what’s going on in this song. However, below all the single-word definitions, the OED did provide a separate definition for the entire phrase (God) rest you merry, with fair and happy listed as archaic alternatives for merry, meaning “may God grant you peace and happiness”. I haue her soueraigne aid, And rest myselfe content.
They give a citation from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: I had never heard someone use it with a direct object before that adjective complement, saying something like, “I rested him assured that we would be on time.” The closest thing the OED has to a transitive rest that takes an adjective complement after its direct object is a reflexive use. The closest syntactic possibility I knew of was an intransitive use, with rest taking an adjectival complement, as in the expression rest assured. What did that mean? Isn’t God rest his soul something you say about a dead person? “May God grant eternal rest to you merry dead guys”? (This use of rest, of course, would be a present subjunctive, but I don’t have any more to say about that.)Īccording to the current Wikipedia entry, rest “denotes ‘keep or make’,” so God rest ye merry would mean “may God keep or make you merry.” I had never known that rest could be used this way. But once I started to think about it, even putting together merry and gentlemen in the seemingly sensible way meant that the rest of the sentence was just God rest ye. All I knew was that somehow, for some reason, the lyrics weren’t intended to refer to merry gentlemen. Well, why wouldn’t they be parsed that way? If you don’t take merry to modify gentlemen, then where else are you going to slot it into the sentence? Linguistics blogs and columns, rarely updatedĪt the Christmas Eve service earlier this evening, the bulletin listed one of the songs as “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen”, and I saw by the placement of the comma that the words merry and gentlemen had been taken to be parts of a single noun phrase, merry gentlemen.Linguistics blogs and columns, occasionally updated.Linguistics blogs and columns, never updated.Lingua Franca (Chronicle of Higher Education).Johnson (Language blog of The Economist).Linguistics blogs and columns, frequently updated.
Rest you merry | 4th Point on Merry Gentlemen?.Steven Lytle on Linguistically Lost Again Barbara Falconer Newhall on Shtraight Talk
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