Believe You Me

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. My name is Ben Fluitt. I’m calling from Richmond, Virginia.

Welcome, Ben.

Hi, how are you?

Doing well, and Grant’s here too.

Hey, bud, what’s up? What can we do for you?

Hi, Grant. I’m calling today because I watched the documentary Salesman not too long ago, and they kept saying, believe you me, and I was just wondering where that expression came from.

I don’t know anything about that documentary. Salesman?

Yeah, why were they saying it a lot?

It’s Albert Maisel’s, I think, did it. And it was, I want to say, like, I’m 22, so I’m going to date myself a little bit. But I want to say it’s like the mid-70s or something like that. But it’s just a ton of old dudes running around selling Bibles. And they were just all, you know, talking about how they weren’t getting sales. And they’d go, believe you, me. And I realized no one said that anymore. And everyone was saying it in this movie.

Okay.

And so the documentary?

Yeah.

Okay.

So it was filmed in the 70s?

Oh, geez. I honestly think so, but it might have even been sooner.

Okay.

Or not sooner, earlier. So your question is, what’s up with believe you me?

Yes.

And you don’t say it.

Oh, no, absolutely not. If I have to say something like that, just say, oh, believe me.

How did it strike you besides sounding a little out of date?

I think it was the usage of both you and me. You’re saying, believe you me. So it sounded a little bit weird to me because you’re like, oh, trust me, but also believe in yourself.

Okay.

Well, one of the reasons it sounds weird to you, I think, is because the word order is different than English usually has it. Usually we do subject, verb, object in modern English. This has verb, subject, object.

Right. So that’s the problem. We would just say, believe me. Believe me. Or you believe me. You believe me instead of believe you me. And so what’s happening is a little bit of emphasis. Now, I noticed that in Fowler’s New Modern English Usage Guide, which I don’t actually check that often because I consider it a little stodgy and out of date. But I checked it for some reason. And it calls this usage condescending. And I thought about that for a while, why they would see it as condescending. I think really my reaction to that is I see believe you me as actually emphatic and distancing. And we’ve talked about distancing on the show. It’s a way of being both firm and a little more informal. So you take a little bit of the sting out of expressing your certainty. And I think that might be what you were hearing from those salesmen.

That’s so interesting.

And that makes a lot of sense, too, because they were kind of bitter that no one was buying their Bibles.

Yeah.

Well, and it’s interesting that you mention Bibles because it’s a construction that you see a fair amount in the King James Version. You see hear ye me and command ye me, which is also a kind of distancing, right?

Yeah, that’s really interesting because I think in the context of the Bible, it makes a lot of sense just because there is that sort of separation that’s emphasized between, you know, the holier than thou and then those that are just, you know, believers and whatnot. Really interesting stuff. This rose to popularity in the 1920s for some reason. It really kind of came to the fore, this particular, believe you me, in the 1880s-ish. But in the 1920s, it just kind of pops up. A lot of stuff changed in language after the First World War, and it had this vogue period in the 1920s and never really completely faded. Even now, you still will hear it. I don’t think it’s as popular as it was. It does seem a little dated now. I have heard it unironically from people in the last year. And it catches your ear.

Yeah, it does catch your ear because it’s that word order. When you hear verb, subject, object, you’re like, I understand what you mean, but that’s not right.

Well, thank you guys so much.

Yeah, our pleasure, Ben.

Thanks for calling.

Take care.

Absolutely.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

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