It shall be our unity that overcomes
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At first, the email seemed like the only literate and competently designed phishing lure that I've ever received. Most of them are obviously written by people who could never pass a TOEFL exam, and have no idea how a bank or an airline or a shipping company addresses its customers. But this message, which arrived under the Subject line "Beat Obama at NO COST to YOU" seemed pretty professional, and even had some competent graphics:
Still, I saw two clues that persuaded me it was a scam, designed to get me to click through to a site that would harvest my personal information for criminal purposes and turn my computer into a zombie tool of international racketeers.
First, the letter was signed by someone calling himself Robert M. "Mike" Duncan. Ha, I thought to myself, it's some Russian mafioso-hireling who thinks that "Mike" is the nickname for "Robert", or doesn't know that an American who uses a form of his middle name "Michael" would call himself "R. Michael Duncan".
And second, the body of the letter used "shall" in a slightly weird way:
We are facing one of the most important elections in history, and it shall be our unity that brings us to victory. [..] The RNC Toolbar will help you raise money through normal online activities such as searching and shopping! Just a click away, you also will have access to breaking news, updates, and messages from the RNC! [boldface original, color highlighting added]
Now, I've never understood the whole shall secret-handshake business. William Cobbett, the prodigious Federalist wingnut and grammarian, wrote in his 1823 Grammar of the English Language ("… in a Series of Letters; Intended for the Use of Schools and of Young Persons in General, but More Especially for the use of Soldiers, Sailors, Apprentices, and Plough-Boys; To Which Are Added Six Lessons, Intended to Prevent Statesmen from Using False Grammar, and From Writing in an Awkward Manner") that
I need not dwell here on the uses of will, shall, may, might, should, would, can, could, and must; which uses, various as they are, are as well known to us all as the uses of our teeth and our noses; and to misapply which words argues not only a deficiency in the reasoning faculties, but also a deficiency in instinctive discrimination.
In A plea for the Queen's English (1866) Henry Alford observed that
The next point which I notice shall be the use of the auxiliaries "shall" and "will." Now here we are at once struck by a curious phenomenon. I never knew an Englishman who misplaced "shall" and "will:" I hardly ever have known an Irishman or Scotchman who did not misplace them sometimes. And it is strange to observe how incurable the propensity is. […] In attempting to give an explanation of our English usage, I may premise that it is exceedingly difficult to do so. We seem to proceed rather on instinct, than by any fixed rule. Yet instinct, in rational beings, must be founded on some inherent fitness of things; and examination ought to be able to detect that fitness.
And H.W. Fowler began his section on Shall and Will with this warning:
It is unfortunate that the idiomatic use, while it comes by nature to southern Englishmen (who will find most of this section superfluous), is so complicated that those who are not to the manner born can hardly acquire it; and for them the section is in danger of being useless.
MWCDEU points out, with copious examples, that Fowler's lengthy attempt to characterize the shall/will distinction is is still descriptively inadequate, in that it fails to account for the usage of writers like Samuel Johnson, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, and so on.
My take on all this is the same as that of most Americans: I never use shall, except in a few fixed phrases; and I generally perceive other Americans who use it as pretentious, affected or precious.
But I do know the simplified form of the principle that is supposed to govern modern British usage:
[T]o express a simple future tense, use shall with I or we, will with you, he, they, etc.; to express permission, obligation, compulsion, etc. use will with I and we, shall elsewhere. [Chambers 1985, quoted in MWCDEU]
Now, it didn't seem to me to be in character for the Republican National Committee's copywriters to use shall at all; but if they did, I figured, they'd do it by the numbers. And "it shall be our unity that brings us to victory" doesn't involve permission, obligation, or compulsion.
So, feeling clever, I concluded that this email must be a fake.
But when I looked into it more deeply, I learned that I was wrong. The links in the email all point to genuine RNC URIs; the idea is treated seriously elsewhere on the web; Robert M. "Mike" Duncan really is the RNC chair.
So now that I know it's not some slavic hacker getting English wrong, I'm back to reacting to shall as pretentious, affected and precious. (I'm not endorsing such prejudices, it's just an honest assessement of how I react.) But I guess there are some other possibilities: a regional dialect effect (maybe there are parts of the U.S. where people deploy shall differently?); conceptual leakage of first-person status from "our unity"; a sense that shall is appropriate for things that are somehow fated to come true.
FYI, here's what the body of the letter looks like:
400guy said,
July 27, 2008 @ 8:47 am
In my Canadian, a.k.a. middle-of-the-Atlantic, high school, I was taught to use the less common auxiliary for emphasis. Thus the statement of an American president, "I shall not seek and will not accept my party's nomination." Just one data point, FWIW.
Michael Roberts said,
July 27, 2008 @ 8:55 am
Sounds sermon-y to this rural Hoosier's ear. Which makes it 100% Republican.
Not that the Republican party isn't a scam, mind you! So your initial instinct was actually pretty accurate.
bearing said,
July 27, 2008 @ 8:59 am
That's really bizarre-sounding!
Maybe they outsourced their mass e-mail composition to Bangalore.
Rob Gunningham said,
July 27, 2008 @ 9:14 am
Chambers 1985: use shall with I or we, will with you, he, they, etc.
Then what about the biblical 'thou shalt not', or does thou go with I and we?
I see nothing wrong with using shall, I think I use it all the time, but I am a bit British.
James said,
July 27, 2008 @ 9:14 am
I think your last possibility ('shall' is for things fated to happen) is closest. I think it expresses a kind of determination — not necessity but determination of will. Compare "…and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." The speaker is determined that it happen, and similarly the GOP is determined that unity overcome. Maybe "it shall be" is even supposed to echo Lincoln?
Oh, wait. Simpler explanation: 'overcome' goes with 'shall', as in the spiritual (where it is also first person).
Ian Tindale said,
July 27, 2008 @ 9:23 am
The more I read everything there is on the interweb, the more pronounced the difference grows between those funny foreigners in America and myself plus everyone else I know in real life.
"Shall" is a bit posh, perhaps, in that you wouldn't hear some common oik uttering it, but for anyone in the classes that can still afford to buy food these days, it's probably second nature to interject accordingly. I'd say that the difference, intuitively, from where I sit, is that 'shall' imbues an impersonal nature to the statement about what it is that shall indicates. Conversely, 'will' indicates that it's you, or me, or someone we might be able to identify, that will do the stuff. 'Shall', therefore is like saying 'it is so' or 'it is the unwritten law' or 'of course, this is simply beyond debate, this is the way things are'. If you use "will", you leave things open to argument, if they "won't" but nobody can contest a "shall". Maybe that's exaggerating what is in fact a slight trait, but that's roughtly about the direction it goes toward as far as I can intuit. Maybe those rural types outside of London use it differently, I don't know – who can possibly tell.
Rob Gunningham said,
July 27, 2008 @ 10:45 am
Will doesn't always work as a replacement for shall. When I ask 'shall I carry your bag for you?' or 'shall I drive you to the station?' or 'shall we take a walk?' you can't say instead 'Will I carry…' Americans would use 'can', I suppose. In England that would lead to some smartass (or schoolteacher) replying 'I don't know, can you?'
Timothy M said,
July 27, 2008 @ 11:04 am
Americans would use 'can', I suppose. In England that would lead to some smartass (or schoolteacher) replying 'I don't know, can you?'
The same thing happens in America, unfortunately. I can't tell you how many times I heard that in elementary school.
Robert Fraser said,
July 27, 2008 @ 11:07 am
@ Rob Gunningham
(As an American,) I would use "should" in each of those situations.
Rob Gunningham said,
July 27, 2008 @ 11:29 am
@ Robert Fraser,
Should sounds correcter than shall. I think it's the right mood, though I'd never use it.
But what about 'Shall we dance?' from 'The King And I'? 'Should we dance?' sounds a bit like they're worried they might get found out. If it's not too good for Yul Brynner, then it's not too good for Mark Liberman, that's what I say.
Rob Gunningham said,
July 27, 2008 @ 11:43 am
If fact, what else can you say except 'Shall we dance?'? 'Will we dance?'? 'Can we dance?' is more a question for the director.
Jim McCusker said,
July 27, 2008 @ 11:49 am
'Shall we dance' is purposefully affected, it suggests that it is accompanied with a little bow. 'May we dance' would be the less formal, but still 'correct' version.
Ran Ari-Gur said,
July 27, 2008 @ 11:53 am
@ Rob Gunningham's first comment: You seem to have misread something, I'm not sure what. Biblical "thou shalt not ___" means "don't ___" (i.e. permission), not "you won't ___" (i.e. futurity).
@ Rob Gunningham's second comment: It's true that "shall" can't always be replaced by "will" in American speech; sometimes it has to be replaced by other things instead. In your example, I'd say "Would you like me to carry your bag for you?" or "May [or can] I carry […]?" or "Am I carrying?", or maybe even just "May I?" with a gesture toward the bag.
Mark Liberman said,
July 27, 2008 @ 11:58 am
Rob Gunningham: But what about 'Shall we dance?' from 'The King And I'?
The King and I was adapted from the story of an English governess in the Siamese court in the 1860s.
"Shall we dance?", like "we shall overcome", is one of the self-conscious quotations where shall survives in general American usage. But as Jim McCusker observes, it's not a natural way to ask the question in contemporary American English. A more idiomatic translation might be something on the continuum of formality from "Do you want to dance?" to "Wanna dance?"; though in most situations where the question would be relevant these days, it's too loud to hear what anyone says anyhow.
felix culpa said,
July 27, 2008 @ 12:01 pm
Echoing James; my sense of their sense is the word ‘victory’ is the determining hermaneutic term; ‘shall’ is used as a triumphalist emphasis.
As in, as James says, “We Shall Overcome”.
Certainly worthy of suspicion.
Rob Gunningham said,
July 27, 2008 @ 12:09 pm
Ran Ari-Gur said, maybe even just "May I?" with a gesture toward the bag.
You'd really resort to gesturing rather than use the word 'shall'? Come on, close your eyes and shout it out of the window: Shall we dance, pom pom pom!
Drew Smith said,
July 27, 2008 @ 12:19 pm
Hmmm, should I tell my brother Jeff that he should refer to himself only as "W. Jeffrey Smith" instead of as "William J. Smith", as he has done for nearly 60 years?
felix culpa said,
July 27, 2008 @ 12:20 pm
OT, but gotta comment on Pro. Liberman’s comment:
Any good conspiracy theories of why places one might choose to have a conversation, with, say, a person found attractive, are so awash in noise?
Even in restaurants the music often obscures crucial clues to what is being said.
The kids seem to take it for granted, and adapt functionally. As a legal senior, I’m left with uttering a grumpy ‘humph’.
Q. Pheevr said,
July 27, 2008 @ 12:20 pm
Well, sometimes nicknames are arbitrary. Just ask Lester B. "Mike" Pearson.
Matthew Stuckwisch said,
July 27, 2008 @ 12:20 pm
I didn't see anything wrong or weird with the shall in the e-mail, sounded perfectly fine to me (though I'm decidedly not Republican or their target audience, except that I'm in the deepest state of the Deep South).
I would think that "Shall I put it in a bag?" != "Can I put it in a bag", rather == "Would you like me to put it in the bag" (I would use the "shall" one in any case).
It also is still around (survives?/unique?) in my area for things like "I shall like to go to the pool today" but almost always with the word like, and in other instances it seems (though I've not paid a lot attention to it) to be reduced to sha, giving rise to potential confusion between should and shall which in most cases both would have virtually the same practical (if not semantic) meaning.
Robert Coren said,
July 27, 2008 @ 12:37 pm
I generally perceive other Americans who use it as pretentious, affected or precious.
I shall refrain from asking why that would need to be "or".
rootlesscosmo said,
July 27, 2008 @ 12:54 pm
"Will I carry your bag for you?" and "Will I drive you to the station?" are frequently heard in some dialects of Irish, with "will" having the same meaning–roughly, a proposal of future action–as "shall" in these usages elsewhere.
Martyn Cornell said,
July 27, 2008 @ 1:35 pm
Matthew Stuckwisch – "I shall like to go to the pool today" would be utterly wrong in British English, and even "I should like …" would sound old-fashioned. "I would like …" would be normal usage, though admittedly it would be mostly shortened to "I'd like …", where it's impossible to tell if what is being shortened is "should" or "would".
When the Coke choir sang "I'd like to teach the world to sing", was that "I SHOULD like" or "I WOULD like" ?
Ian Tindale said,
July 27, 2008 @ 2:01 pm
Actually, I take that back about the oik class. I'd find it perfectly easy to imagine a conversation in one of several million council flats along the lines of "There ain't nuffin' on telly, shall we go down the pub?", to which the answer would be an obvious fetching of coats and filing through the door. Quite why I excluded them initially is beyond me now.
Rob Gunningham said,
July 27, 2008 @ 2:17 pm
Under George Bush, I would have expected the 'Federal Plain Language Guidelines' to say that the legal uses of 'shall' are going to be replaced by 'might'.
Joe Hankin said,
July 27, 2008 @ 2:33 pm
This is speculation on my part, but I have a feeling the "it shall be our…" construction is a coded message to the Christian Republican base, echoing biblical constructions such as "it shall be our righteousness…" (Deut. 6:25). Certainly "shall" in non-idiomatic phrases sounds very King James Version to me, and given the GOP's penchant for so-called "dog whistle" religious references in their literature and speeches, I wouldn't be surprised if this were an (extremely subtle) version of that tactic.
Faldone said,
July 27, 2008 @ 4:08 pm
Back in the '70s, in Flagstaff, Arizona, I was auditing an English linguistics class and we had an assignment to spend a week listening to normal usage for instances of shall and will. In the week of listening I heard not one instance of either, just 'll.
dr pepper said,
July 27, 2008 @ 6:04 pm
I think that "shall i take your bags?" is being rendered moot with the increasing use of "would you lijke some help with your bags"?
W. Kiernan said,
July 27, 2008 @ 7:05 pm
Can I help you with your bags?
I don't know, can you? (heh heh.)
No, I can't (asshole.)
Geoff Nathan said,
July 27, 2008 @ 7:15 pm
But as Jim McCusker observes, it's not a natural way to ask the question in contemporary American English.
Mark, I'm not sure I agree with you on this. I've certainly heard bright young thing servers ask:
'Shall I wrap that up for you?'
and I normally say things like:
'Shall we leave at 7, then?'
It's limited to 'interrogatives', and apparently only first person, but I'm pretty sure it's still alive and kicking, if a bit feebly…
John Cowan said,
July 27, 2008 @ 7:56 pm
In my speech "shall I?" is current, because it is the best way to offer something, but I don't say "shall we?", because I don't make offers on behalf of other people. I don't use shall in any declarative sentences.
In standards-speak, some standards organization use SHALL (in caps or otherwise emphasized) to specify a requirement of the standard, though others use MUST in the same sense. See RFC 2119 for an explanation of the technical usage of SHALL, MUST, SHALL NOT, MUST NOT, SHOULD, SHOULD NOT, and MAY.
Mark said,
July 27, 2008 @ 8:11 pm
Rob Gunningham said,
"You'd really resort to gesturing rather than use the word 'shall'? Come on, close your eyes and shout it out of the window: Shall we dance, pom pom pom!"
You seem to have the impression that "shall" is something we consciously avoid using, for fear of sounding affected. It's not like that. The word just doesn't come to mind.
Two other observations: First, this discussion ignores "going to"/"gonna", which in many speech contexts is the most natural way for me to express futurity. Saying that "will" has supplanted "shall" in shall's former haunts of American English is ignoring the growth of gonna.
Second, even in American English, "shall" is still alive and well in the area of technical specifications, e.g. for software. Requirements are specified with sentences like "The command shall return -1 on error."
Finally, In answer to Martin Cornell's question about the Coke song, "I'd like" is a contraction of "I would like", assuming the song is in American English.
sandra wilde said,
July 28, 2008 @ 1:37 am
I think shall/will is a great example of language change. Perhaps 50 years ago language "purists" would have been bothered by speakers using "will" in the first person, but now nobody would even know what they're talking about. 50 years from now locutions like "funner" and "me and sally went out" are likely to be completely acceptable with no one understanding why there'd ever been any fuss about them.
Bob Ladd said,
July 28, 2008 @ 3:03 am
@ rootlesscosmo and several others: Things like "Will I drive you to the station?" are also common in Scottish English. Took my American ears a while to get used to that, and it seems to be one of the things that strike English people as outlandish about the way the language is spoken in Scotland (cf. the quote from Henry Alford in Mark's original post).
Rachael said,
July 28, 2008 @ 5:44 am
"to express permission, obligation, compulsion, etc. use will with I and we, shall elsewhere."
"And "it shall be our unity that brings us to victory" doesn't involve permission, obligation, or compulsion."
Note the "etc." – "permission, obligation, compulsion" isn't exhaustive. Personally, I'd add "determination" or "commitment" to the list. "It shall be our unity" does involve determination/commitment.
Basically, "it shall" is emphatic in one way or another, and "it will" is unmarked future.
Leigh said,
July 28, 2008 @ 9:29 am
I grew up in a hellfire and brim stone preaching church, and it sounds like a sermon to me. The King James English works kind of like a fundementalist dog-whistle. When you start using the thee's and shall's, it somehow turns off the part of their brain that has any reasoning capability whatsoever. Twenty years later, and I am still trying to improve my critical thinking skills.
Kate G said,
July 28, 2008 @ 10:07 am
The classic example on this involves "I shall drown! No-one will save me!" – a search for which led to, among other things, this pretty good summary: http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/shall-versus-will.aspx. I have an English Quality Consultant so our specs are full of SHALL and she turns up her nose at any WILL sentences, but that's QA-specific jargon.
Rob Gunningham said,
July 28, 2008 @ 10:50 am
Kate G: this pretty good summary: http://grammar.quickandd…
Except that it contradicts itself:
you use shall…if you are using first person (I or we) and will if you are using second or third person (you, he, she, or they).
and then
an example from British author Evelyn Waugh: “One day you shall know my full story.”
Not that it is unusual in that, nobody really knows the rules here. I'm always looking for useful things for linguists to do to help, sort of like public interest lawyers or Médecins Sans Frontières. As a public service, surely British linguists could pull themselves together and get this thing properly nailed.
E W Gilman said,
July 28, 2008 @ 11:20 am
From the perspective of 10 years retirement, I tend to think that all the arcane rules about "shall" and "will" stem from Wallis's 17th century grammar, which was written to help nonspeakers of English with the language, and like all such works, was simplified to safe alternatives for its readers. I do not think Wallis ever intended to represent actual English usage. But grammarians and pedagogues being what they are, a set of handy rules is too good to pass up, and so they have been handed down the years.
ajay said,
July 28, 2008 @ 12:22 pm
Gut feeling from this British English speaker: "will" has more of a sense of inevitability, "shall" implies there's some element of human choice. This seems more obvious with "should" and "would" – "Will people come in through this side door?" "They will, but they shouldn't, because it's marked EXIT".
"People wouldn't come in the side door" – very different from "people shouldn't come in the side door".
I would definitely say "shall we meet at 6" rather than "will we meet at 6"; the latter has more of an into-the-hands-of-Fate sound to it. "Will you be here at 6?" "Yes, unless my flight is late" works, though.
"Shall" in the second person only sounds right in the imperative – "you shall do X!" and in the third it would not be common British usage in my opinion.
Joe said,
July 28, 2008 @ 2:17 pm
> Still, I saw two clues that persuaded me it was a scam, designed to get me to click through to a site that would harvest my personal information for criminal purposes and turn my computer into a zombie tool of international racketeers.
Look carefully enough and you shall find a third.
Michael Roberts said,
July 28, 2008 @ 3:07 pm
> Can I help you with your bags?
> I don't know, can you? (heh heh.)
The proper answer is "Well (coff, coff) it's been a couple of weeks since the chemo, so I thought I'd try."
Steve Harris said,
July 28, 2008 @ 7:44 pm
@ Rob Gunningham in re "Will I carry a bag for you?":
LL-noted author Patrick O'Brian puts precisely that sort of construction in the mouth of Stephen Maturin. I note that Maturin had an early childhood in Ireland, born maybe 1780, and is a bit posh (being a physician). Until I saw Bob Ladd's comment, I thought this was an outdated usage.
Daniel Barkalow said,
July 29, 2008 @ 12:03 am
If someone responds to "Can I take your bag?" with "I don't know, can you?", the obvious thing to do is to try, and report how it goes. It seems odd to me to use this particular pattern in the case when someone's ability is dependent on the other person going along with it, as opposed to the more usual elementary school situation where the person surely can go to the bathroom (or whatever), but is trying to ask whether they'll get in trouble for doing so.
Rob Gunningham said,
July 29, 2008 @ 5:03 am
@ Steve Harris, Wiki calls him a physician, naturalist and spy. What with Dr House and Dr Watson, I'm wondering when there's going to be a linguist in this sort of role. It may be too desk-bound a job, but on the other hand we rarely see Watson actually working. Medicine and linguistics are both plausible backstory.
@ David Barkalow, Bob Dylan on 'Theme-time Radiohour: 'I remember when I was in school the teacher said "If you have to go to the bathroom just raise your hand". I asked, "How's that going to stop it?"'
D. B. Propert said,
July 29, 2008 @ 11:30 am
From the (U.S.) Federal Acquisition Regulation, Part 2.101 "Definitions" (48 CFR Chapter 1),
'“Shall” means the imperative.'
Though I suspect the current example is more due to seepage from the King James bible, it could also be the result of legalese entering daily use. In a country with over 1 million practicing lawyers, and many others trained in the field, the influence of the law upon other written language is not trivial.
Lane said,
July 29, 2008 @ 1:53 pm
Your realization that it was a "scam" by "international racketeers" oddly seems to presume that the Republican Party, as currently constituted and run, is not a band of international racketeers.
Shadow Wolf said,
August 3, 2008 @ 8:36 pm
Lane: Your realization that it was a "scam" by "international racketeers" oddly seems to presume that the Republican Party, as currently constituted and run, is not a band of international racketeers.
Of course the Republican party isn't a band of international racketeers – they're a band of American racketeers.
Cheryl Thornett said,
August 4, 2008 @ 3:51 am
I teach my ESOL students (in England) to use shall for invitations and suggestions or, at a more advanced level, for emphasis. The traditional will/shall distinctions (which I have always suspected originated with the older grammarians) don't seem to be very strong in everyday language and I have not encountered it as a teaching point in any modern EFL or ESL textbooks.
hillhopper said,
September 2, 2008 @ 9:41 am
The predicate use of "will" and "shall" is indicative of a degree of determination in the commitment of the response. Legal codes use this device to fix the obligatory demands of agreement to provide for the remedy of the result when variation is obvious. If the result is contrary to the agreement of the terms of the statement, the results cannot be accounted for. The implications of a predicate tense as in participles, are connected to the unknowns of the universals and particulars of the nominatives. To analize a statement for all of it's possibilities, the results of the analysis should indicate probabilities as particular from possibilities. Let me quote: " Whatever is affirmed of a whole term may have partially affirmed of
it whatever is included in that term (Bramantip, Dimaris), and
partially denied of it whatever is excluded (Fesapo); whatever is
affirmed of part of a term may have partially denied of it whatever
is wholly excluded from that term (Fresison); and whatever is denied
of a whole term may have wholly denied of it whatever is wholly
included in that term (Camenes)." -Deductive Logic, by St. George Stock, Oxford, 1888.
hillhopper said,
September 2, 2008 @ 9:48 am
Post Hoc; "Even a rational mind can be easily fooled into disproportion". -a