By now many of us have seen the viral acapella parody that tells us where the comma goes in the Christmas carol. It’s: “God rest ye merry, gentlemen.”
But why?
Grab a coffee and settle in.
When the carol was written in the 16th or 17th century, “rest” was commonly used as a verb with the modern meaning of “keep” and “merry” meant something more like “contented” or happy. In other words, if we were to write the sentence today, we might say, “God keep you happy, gentlemen” or “Continue to be content, gentlemen.” Semantically, it makes sense to have the comma where it is.
If that’s all you needed to know, you can stop reading. From here on, we play games.
Having determined that “rest” is a verb, we can see that “merry” is an adverb that qualifies that verb. We all learned that to determine an adverb, we ask “How?” So: How should the gentlemen rest? Merry. Contentedly.
We put a comma after the clause “God rest ye merry” to remove any ambiguity over what the “merry” qualifies.
“But!” I hear you shout, “Dickens put the comma in front of the ‘merry’!”
Why yes, so he did—good observation!
At the start of A Christmas Carol, a young tyke shouts through the keyhole of Ebenezer Scrooge’s house,
“God bless you, merry gentleman!
May nothing you dismay!”
Dickens, never one to shy away from a good joke, has moved the comma. (He also says, “bless you” not “rest you”—more on that later.) Dickens deliberately misplaces it to make the word “merry”—which by 1843 had undergone a semantic shift to include the sense of “jolly”— function as an adjective rather than an adverb, as originally intended. It now pertains directly to Scrooge, who we all know is anything but merry at the start of this tale. This also explains why “gentleman” is singular.
If we moved the comma up one more word, making the sentence read “God rest, ye merry gentlemen,” we can see traces of another semantic shift in action. “God rest” now gains a meaning closer to “Godspeed,” an archaic injunction from the Middle English god speide: God prosper you, or God bless you. “God rest” and “God bless” basically mean the same thing. Dickens did not misquote the song. The lyrics changed over time to substitute more contemporary words. Words? Plural? Yes, “you” is a more contemporary version of “ye.”
Now if we move the comma up once more, we turn the phrase into what I will call the “Three a.m. noisy neighbours” version. In this version, “merry” means something akin to “inebriated”: “God, rest you merry gentlemen!” Or, following the current trend of adding end punctuation to every word, we might write that as “God! Rest! You! Merry! Gentleman!”
And so I shall.