Some thoughts on vintage Forest Service posters:
There were probably debates about “your” versus “thy” versus “my.” It would be confusing to say “thy,” since “thy” always means “God,” but “thy” had more Biblical authority than “your.” “My” might suggest Smokey owned the forests, and was assuming the first-person voice of the author of the other Ten Commandments, and some people have enough trouble with the Trinity without bringing a bear into it.
From you guessed it.
Authoritarianism is hard work — even the grammar rebels!
His take on “thy” had me confused. “Thy” is the familiar form of “your” and has nothing to do with God, other than that the authors of the King James Bible thought people and God would speak using the familiar instead of the formal. A more modern translation would use “bro'” or “dude.”
Lots of people who only encounter “thy” and “thou” in the Bible assume the words imply an exalted one, but they’re actually the way you’d speak to a wife or a pet.
Don’t the Ten Commandments begin, “I am the Lord thy God…”?
Aren’t there commandments about honoring “thy” mother and “thy” father, and coveting “thy” neighbor’s wife? So why wouldn’t a tongue-in-cheek Eleventh Commandment warn against burning down “thy” forests?
Half of the trouble in these modern times is 90% overthinking things.
As something to sound like a King James Biblical commandment, “thy forests” would be fine, but not for the reasoning given, which was
The King James Version also used “thy” to refer to regular people and Satan. It’s just a older construction that fell out of use sometime between 1568 and 1611 and was used in the KJV because of anti-Puritan religious politics, as English had already switched to using “your” for the singular possessive.
Protip: when using Google translate to talk to a foreign friend, use “thee/thy” instead of “you/your” to get the correct informal words in the other language. Otherwise you sound stilted.