Which I prefer over superstitions about ordering dead people to “rest in peace,” because brain preservationists want to turn death from a permanent off-state into a temporary and reversible off-state.
Seriously, think about the traditional expression. We use the imperative tense of the verb “to rest,” and it sounds like a spell one of our shamanistic ancestors came up with to keep ghosts from bothering the living.
We use the imperative tense of the verb “to rest,” and it sounds like a spell one of our shamanistic ancestors came up with to keep ghosts from bothering the living.
Not so. Neither the expression “rest in peace” nor the longer version “may s/he rest in peace” contains any imperative verbs. (Also, the imperative is a mood, not a tense.)
In the full expression, the mood is optative, not imperative. That should be clear from the examples at this link. It does not express a command; it expresses a wish.
Link: grammar.about.com on “mood” actually uses “May he rest in peace” as an example of a sentence using the optative.
As for the shorter “rest in peace,” it can be understood either as a truncated version of “may s/he rest in peace,” in which case the verb is still optative; or it can be treated as a complete expression. If it’s a complete expression then the mood is just subjunctive.
The English expression is a translation of the Latin Requiescat in pace, in which the verb is unambiguously subjunctive.
Link: grammaring.com uses “Rest in peace” as an example of a sentence with a present subjunctive.
He has entered the Off-State.
Which I prefer over superstitions about ordering dead people to “rest in peace,” because brain preservationists want to turn death from a permanent off-state into a temporary and reversible off-state.
Seriously, think about the traditional expression. We use the imperative tense of the verb “to rest,” and it sounds like a spell one of our shamanistic ancestors came up with to keep ghosts from bothering the living.
Not so. Neither the expression “rest in peace” nor the longer version “may s/he rest in peace” contains any imperative verbs. (Also, the imperative is a mood, not a tense.)
In the full expression, the mood is optative, not imperative. That should be clear from the examples at this link. It does not express a command; it expresses a wish.
English doesn’t actually inflect for the optative mood; instead, optative meaning is expressed by verbs that are morphologically indistinguishable from the subjunctive or indicative verbs.
Link: grammar.about.com on “mood” actually uses “May he rest in peace” as an example of a sentence using the optative.
As for the shorter “rest in peace,” it can be understood either as a truncated version of “may s/he rest in peace,” in which case the verb is still optative; or it can be treated as a complete expression. If it’s a complete expression then the mood is just subjunctive.
The English expression is a translation of the Latin Requiescat in pace, in which the verb is unambiguously subjunctive.
Link: grammaring.com uses “Rest in peace” as an example of a sentence with a present subjunctive.