Q: I was stopped by this sentence in an Angela Thirkell novel: “Do let’s do this again.” What is the first “do” doing there?
A: That “do” in The Old Bank House (1949) is an auxiliary verb used to give polite encouragement to a command. It’s a very old usage that dates back to Anglo-Saxon days.
As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, the “do” here is used “with an affirmative imperative: adding emphasis or urgency to an entreaty, exhortation, or command.”
The OED’s earliest citation is from the Gospel of John, 8:11, in the West Saxon Gospels, also known as the Wessex Gospels, dating from the late 900s:
“Do ga & ne synga þu næfre ma” (“Do go and not sin thou never more”).
As for the second “do” in your sentence, the one that means to perform an action, the first OED citation is from the Metres of Boethius, an Old English verse translation of De Consolatione Philosophiae (“The Consolation of Philosophy”), a sixth-century Latin treatise by the Roman philosopher Boethius:
“Hio sceal eft don þæt hio ær dyde” (“It shall do again what it ere did”). Boethius is saying that any living creature will eventually return to the nature it was born with.
In case you’re curious about the imperative “let’s” in the sentence you questioned (“Do let’s do this again”), we wrote a post in 2012 that discusses the history of the contraction “let’s.”
We’ll end now with a recent example from the title of a book by the Northern Irish historian, author, and broadcaster Gareth Russell:
Do Let’s Have Another Drink! The Dry Wit and Fizzy Life of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (2022).
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