Someone was commenting in the paper about Catholics adopting an extra syllable in the translation of the Mass from this month by saying, ‘Glory to you, O Lord’ instead of ‘Glory to you, Lord’. It does sound more polite.
O with the vocative sounds archaic now. I seldom say, ‘O my husband.’ But O still retains a lively existence. We may be condescending to former centuries for inconsistent spelling, but our spelling of O, which looks simple enough, has slipped in the past 100 years. In 1902, the Oxford English Dictionary commented that, as an interjection, the spelling Oh ‘is now usual only when the exclamation is quite detached from what follows’. So the Edwardians would be expected to exclaim ‘Oh!’ on burning a finger, but ‘O dear!’ when commiserating. Today, O is used before vocatives and Oh! for exclamations, though Robert Burchfield’s wise revision of Fowler notes that there is no exceptionless rule.
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