You, believe me, me you. Me. Damn.

I make my living at language – primarily English; which is fortunate, because I don’t actually have any other languages hiding up my sleeve.

Early in life I found a love of writing, but fell asleep in the English classes when the teacher tried to tell me about sentence structure. Verbs, adverbs, adjectives, pronouns, proverbs(?); generally, I still have to look up the meanings.

But I love the language. I love playing with words and meanings and twisting things in strange and unusual new directions.

Now, my point – and I do have one – is that some phrases in English just do my head in. Everyone knows what they mean, so the fact they don’t make any sense never seems to be an issue. Unless you’re like me and have a brain that slams on the brakes and goes “what the bloody hell was that?”

One phrase in particular gets me every time. It is grammatically correct according to 1600s phraseology, but actually only started being used in the early 1900s. It’s this – believe you me.

What?

Now my father used this phrase often. Except he had no real education so made it fit by adding an extra word – “believe you and me”. Which kind of made sense. It works in the “we have both reached an agreement on this point and believe it, and you should too” way.

But later in life I discovered my dad had put me wrong (as he did in so many ways – “Yes, Davy Crockett was real, but Daniel Boone was just made up” being just one example).

The true phrase was: “Believe you me”. Which is technically correct on the old verb-subject-object stage, but not on the modern subject-verb-object platform. But it’s just so out of place.

It’s not even like Shakespeare wrote it and it stuck. No, apparently it didn’t even turn up in the Oxford English Dictionary until 1926. This made me think maybe it was originally a proper phrase, but it got damaged in the trenches during the First World War.

It was originally something like: “I believe you should come with me”. But it was hit by shrapnel and the field surgeons had to do some emergency editing; lopping off some words so it ended up just: “believe you me”.

It limps into the English language (first recorded use in 1919), bruised and bleeding. But it recovered well and became instilled as part of day-to-day speech. I’m not saying we should get rid of it, but just ask that you be aware of it and see if it starts doing your head in as it has mine.

So, believe you me, the point is made.