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
Prithee in the replacement of such phrases as "excuse me" and "pardon me," which request understanding or forgiveness, with "I am sorry," which instead acknowledges the speaker's remorse. In the "Complete Works of Shakespeare", "prithee" occurs 228 times while "pray thee" occurs only 92 times. Prithee Prithee is an archaic English interjection formed from a corruption of the phrase "pray thee" ([I] ask you [to]), which was initially an exclamation of contempt used to indicate a subject's triviality. The earliest recorded appearance of the word "prithee" according to the Oxford English Dictionary was in 1577 and the last appearance was in