For the Love of Prepositions Part 11—Till Death us do Part

Till, until, unto and unless

If ever a reminder were needed that, where language is concerned, rules can, will and should be broken, the well-known phrase from the Anglican wedding vows with which I title this post is surely one of them. The phrase deviates from standard present-day English in various respects. It does not obey strict Subject-Verb-Object word order. It unnecessarily uses auxiliary do. The verb does not agree with the subject with respect to number. A colloquial abbreviated form of until is used.

But hang on! There is nothing ‘wrong’ with till. Till or til is actually older than until, going back to Anglo Saxon and beyond. Scandinavian languages still use this ancient preposition more broadly in the spatial and temporal senses of Modern English to. Until does not appear until the turn of the 12^th century.

The un- prefix also means till; it has nothing to do with the homonymous negative prefix. By reduplicating the temporal distance like this, the word gains a somewhat wistful, lugubrious, if not grim flavor. If you really want to drag things out, you can also add up, to produce long drawn out yawning phrases such as up until the very last minute.

We find the same un- prefix in more antique-sounding but actually more recent (14^th century) unto. This word has been kept alive largely by the King James Bible, where it is used to lend duly reverent weight to joyless prognostications: “Unto dust shalt thou return,” “sickness unto death” and so forth. Different from until, unto can also be used spatially and as a fancy synonym for to: “And God spake unto Abraham” and the like.

Likewise, perusal of an etymological dictionary informs us, somewhat to our surprise, that the un in unless likewise has nothing to do with the negative prefix and is of relatively recent provenance, beefing up less or lest with a prefix that was originally on-, meaning on the condition less and borrowing some of the pseudo-atavistic weight of unto and until.

Defendants famously have the right to be considered innocent unless and until proven guilty. The until is necessary here. Otherwise, proof of guilt could be deemed to attach automatically in some circumstances and due process would thereby be dispensable.

Lest, by the way, is a contraction of the less that and means that not. It too has a somewhat intimidating judgmental or else feel to it. Lest we forget…

To return to till, readers may also be as intrigued as I was to discover that it is cognate with the verb till (prepare land for planting) by way of a Proto-German root which also gave rise to Modern German Ziel (purpose, end, goal). It is entirely unrelated, however, to the noun till (cashbox), which belongs to the toll, tally, teller word cluster.