is to say.  The phrase, “we do you to wit,” (in 2 Cor., viii, 1st,) means, “we inform you.”  Churchill gives the present tense of this verb three forms, weet, wit, and wot; and there seems to have been some authority for them all:  as, “He was, to weet, a little roguish page.”—­Thomson.  “But little wotteth he the might of the means his folly despiseth.”—­Tupper’s Book of Thoughts, p. 35. To wit, used alone, to indicate a thing spoken of, (as the French use their infinitive, savoir, a savoir, or the phrase, c’est a savoir,) is undoubtedly an elliptical expression:  probably for, “I give you to wit;” i. e., “I give you to know.” Trow, to think, occurs in the Bible; as, “I trow not.”—­N.  Test.  And Coar gives it as a defective verb; and only in the first person singular of the present indicative, “I trow.”  Webster and Worcester mark the words as obsolete; but Sir W. Scott, in the Lady of the Lake, has this line: 

   “Thinkst thou he trow’d thine omen ought?”—­Canto iv, stanza 10.

Quoth and quod, for say, saith, or said, are obsolete, or used only in ludicrous language.  Webster supposes these words to be equivalent, and each confined to the first and third persons of the present and imperfect tenses of the indicative mood.  Johnson says, that, “quoth you,” as used by Sidney, is irregular; but Tooke assures us, that “The th in quoth, does not designate the third person.”—­Diversions of Purley, Vol. ii, p. 323.  They are each invariable, and always placed before the nominative:  as, quoth I, quoth he.

   “Yea, so sayst thou, (quod Troeylus,) alas!”—­Chaucer.

    “I feare, quod he, it wyll not be.”—­Sir T. More.

    “Stranger, go!  Heaven be thy guide!
    Quod the beadsman of Nith-side.”—­Burns.

OBS. 6.—­Methinks, (i. e., to me it thinks,) for I think, or, it seems to me, with its preterit methought, (i. e., to me it thought,) is called by Dr. Johnson an “ungrammatical word.”  He imagined it to be “a Norman corruption, the French being apt to confound me and I.”—­Joh.  Dict. It is indeed a puzzling anomaly in our language, though not without some Anglo-Saxon or Latin parallels; and, like its kindred, “me seemeth,” or “meseems,” is little worthy to be countenanced, though often used by Dryden, Pope, Addison, and other good writers.  Our lexicographers call it an impersonal verb, because, being compounded with an objective, it cannot have a nominative expressed.  It is nearly equivalent to the adverb apparently; and if impersonal, it is also defective; for it has no participles, no “methinking,” and no participial construction of “methought;”