A reader suggested that my “thou” / “you” distinction was backwards, and “‘thee’, ‘thou’, ‘thy’ are the formal uses, while ‘you’ is the informal.”
Nope: Thou, thee, and thy (the grammatical equivalents of I, me, and my, though used for the second-person informal singular) were the informal versions. They may sound formal because they seem (1) archaic, and the past seems like a more formal time than the present, and (2) related to the Bible (“Thou shalt not . . .”), which seems like a more formal document than modern documents. But that’s not so: “You,” “you,” and “your” (the nominative and the objective are of course the same for “you,” though they differ with “thou” and “thee,” as they do for “I” and “me”) are the formal.
I’m not an expert on why the religious works used “thou,” but I suspect that it was a mixture of (1) the notion that the God-man relationship should be intimate and (2) the notion that when God speaks to man, he is speaking as superior to inferior, which cuts in favor of using the informal. (Item 2 isn’t the only explanation, because sometimes “thou” is used when man speaks to God, e.g., “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” but I suspect that in the “Thou shalt not”s, both are in some measure in play.) Quakers also use or once used “thee” (though for some reason they use it instead of “thou” as the nominative as well as in the objective, essentially the equivalent of using “me” both for “I” and “me”) amongst themselves instead of “you”; there the justification, I think was the we-are-all-Friends thing.
So, no, calling people “thou,” even as a little bit of a joke, isn’t a good way to sound fancier or more dignified. If the word is understood literally (as opposed to “I’m trying to sound fancier or more dignified”), it will be either as a slight (I’m your superior) or as an unwanted familiarity (I’m using a salutation that’s more intimate than what you use with your lover). If you get slapped, you deserve it.
Of course, if you scream this in the throes of passion (remembering always that, unless you’re a Quaker, you must say “thou” to refer to the other person when saying what he or she is doing, but “thee” to refer to the other person when saying what you are doing to him or her), you’ll be entirely grammatically correct.
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