Ye Olde, Gone Berserk

I've always loved the affectation "Ye Olde . . ."  The attempt to establish venerability is laughably misguided.  And as a marketing strategy it isn't even remotely convincing; therein lies its charm.

I remember going on vacation as a child, before interstate highways existed.  You could travel a hundred miles - it would take three hours - and wind up in a world utterly different from where you began.  My family really wanted to get away, so we would drive 6 or 7 hours to spend a week at a cabin on a Vermont lake.  Inevitably we would pass through two or three ye olde tourist havens.  There would be "authentic" rustic trading posts and Indian villages, general stores and log cabins.  There would be larger-than-life wooden statues of bears, Indians, and lumberjacks.  One particular trading post had an outdoor platform advertising a live dancing bear.  The traffic would always be terribly slow, giving us kids plenty of time to harass our parents to please stop and let us watch the bear, or buy salt-water taffy.  Mom and Dad were not fooled by "ye olde."

"Ye", as an alternative to "the," is an accident of technology.  Old English made use of an Anglo-Saxon letter called "thorn" to indicate the sound we know as "th."  It looked like this:  Þ or þ.  During the Middle Ages, "þ" was eventually replaced by "th," except in common words like "the," which looked like this:  þe.  When printing came to England, printers looked for an alternative to "þ," which they didn't usually have in their lettersets.  A handwritten "þ" looked like a capital "Y," and so "Ye" was born (often looking like this:  Ye).  It was still meant to be pronounced "the," but eventually everyone came to pronounce it "yee."

So "Ye Olde Clock Shoppe" is meant to signify age, and thus authenticity.  The fact that "ye olde" is used for the least authentic establishments gives it its campiness.  Modern usage is meant for sentimentality (those good ol' 1950's!) when it isn't being just plain quaint, or wrong-headed.  One of my favorite modern uses is a window store in Warwick RI that inexplicably calls itself The Window Shoppee, with the extra "e" thrown in for emphasis, I guess.

I met a guy once named Bob whose life appeared to be taking place in the eighteenth century.  He wore period clothing when he could, wore an antiquated hairstyle, and had appropriately remodeled his house, right down to clever ways to hide modern amenities like electrical outlets.  We called him Ye Olde Bob.

Recently I played a gig at a bar in the basement of The Ancient Mariner Inn, in Foxboro MA.  It's one of those old hotels you can still find in some town centers.  Before the gig, I tried to locate the bar in a phonebook or an online listing, but I had no luck until I finally stumbled across it - the official spelling is "The Ancyent Marinere."

I knew it was probably just a local dive, but I sure was hoping that the hotel would have an old, dilapidated, possibly neon sign with "The Ancyent Marinere" in big 1950's letters.  You know the kind of sign I mean.  They used to be all along highways like US Rte 1 and US Rte 6, advertising motels and restaurants and miniature-golf courses.  This was prime "ye olde" territory, though much of it is gone now.

But modernism had taken its toll in Foxboro as well, and to my disappointment I was greeted with a modest, newer sign that said "The Ancient Marinere."  The sign was probably put up the same time as the vinyl siding.  I was cheered by that extra "e," though, and at least in the phonebook you can still find "The Ancyent Marinere."

BC

Here's Wikipedia on "ye" and "thorn."