Prithee the addressee, as in "if it please you," "prithee" accompanies a request which addresses itself to the threat of being answered in the negative, as though the request were against the addressee's wishes. Stated otherwise, the word "please" suggests that the person being addressed is willing to comply with the request, whereas the word "prithee" suggests that he or she is not willing. This switch from stating the speaker's contrary desire to stating the speaker's wish not to impose signaled a cultural shift in the English-speaking world in which politeness became stated negatively rather than positively. Wider repercussions are observable
What Is History? of change. If you are allergic to these processes, you abandon history and take cover in the social sciences. Today anthropology, sociology, etc, flourish. History is sick. But then our society too is sick". Carr deplored the rise of Structuralism. Carr wrote there was the structuralist approach, which Carr called a "horizontal" way of understanding history "which analyses a society in terms of the functional or structural inter-relation of its parts". Against it, there was what Carr called the "vertical" approach "which analyses it [society] in terms of where it has come from and where it is going". Through Carr