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Is “do the needful” correct?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thesaintlives 3y agoAs often heard in India! That and many other weird and wonderful phrases...
- CharlesW 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_English#Vocabulary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_English#Vocabulary
- foogazi 3y agoI can see revert to be confusing in a tech environment
- owenmarshall 3y agoI was once late for a meeting because my coworker needed to prepone it and I just assumed I’d misheard.
- philwelch 3y ago"Prepone" is a brilliant word that the rest of us need to adopt.
- thanksgiving 3y agoThis one I absolutely agree with. I love preponed meetings because I can easily skip it.
- hotpotamus 3y agoIt reminds me a bit of The Assassin's Guild in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. They didn't murder or assassinate anyone; they "inhumed" them - as in the opposite of exhume them.
- blamazon 3y agoHorn OK please! (Note: considered outdated, but I still love the phrase) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horn_OK_Please https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horn_OK_Please
- SanjayMehta 3y agoThe origins of this phrase goes back to a middle signal light called the “OK light” on trucks. When you wanted to overtake a truck, you were supposed to tap your horn, and the truck driver would flash this middle light to tell you it was safe to overtake. That signal light disappeared decades ago, but that phrase remains. It was originally: “Horn Please” above, and “Ok” written under that signal light.
- politelemon 3y agoI've noticed that expression rubs people the wrong way in corporate environments. It gets seen as a cop out from having to put any effort towards a task or issue, and throws responsibility over the fence abruptly and in an unhelpful way.
- CharlesW 3y agoMany native English speakers I've worked with consider it rude and/or condescending, to the point that on a couple of occasions I've let Indian English speakers know this. My thinking is that if I spoke another language and was using an English phrase that translated poorly, I'd want to know.
- OldGuyInTheClub 3y agoAs a native English speaker I've let my native English speaking management know about all sorts of rude, condescending, infantilizing corporate doublespeak and yet it gets worse every year. "Do the needful" pales in comparison to the codswallop in the layoff notices that get posted here regularly.
- hotpotamus 3y agoYeah, to me it's basically just a vernacular peculiar to Indians that would be almost exactly equivalent to "take care of that". The one that blew me away in my first corporate job was referring to people as "resources". And I don't mean as in the human resources department which I begrudgingly accept. I mean saying things, like "let me get a resource" to mean get a person. I get that we're viewed as replaceable cogs in the machine, but there's no need to rub our faces in that. I actually did have some success in persuading people that it was dehumanizing.
- howinteresting 3y agoSee, this is the correct take. Using "resources" for people shook me the first time I heard it in a high-level planning meeting. I'm being serious here that it kept me up all night.
- a-dub 3y agoi remember when this phrase started confusing lots of westerners during the central asian global IT (and support) boom of the early aughts. it was not uncommon to see these phrases appear in support tickets. i wonder if western phrases like "i will take care of it" sound equally discordant to central asian ears...
- marktani 3y agoI swear I read this phrase a while ago in a funny HN thread.. can't seem to find it anymore
- phreack 3y agoThat's a loaded title that the site doesn't really address at all! What does it mean for a dialect to be correct? It may sound weird and we've wrong to Americans and such but Indian English is as valid as any other English dialect, there are so many people speaking it for such a long time that it's evolved in a fascinating way, keeping some expressions that have falling out of use elsewhere and making up entirely new ones as well. I hoped for an analysis on that aspect of Language.
- jt2190 3y agoYes what would be interesting is to compare the phrase in English to the same phrase in a few widely-spoken languages in India, to see if the English phrasing is mimicking, say, Hindi or Telegu or Tamil or… [long list of languages omitted for brevity.]
- SanjayMehta 3y agoI have never heard it spoken in any language, even in English, only started seeing it in “formal” emails post 1996.
- famouswaffles 3y ago"Do the needful" is used in Nigeria as well. So i feel like it is almost certainly an extinct British phrase.
- ignoramous 3y agoTFA agrees: Do the needful originated in India, is commonly used in African countries, and was once heard frequently in the United Kingdom as well. After the Victorian period, its usage in the West died out, but with the increase in outsourcing to and from India, it started catching the ear of English speakers in the West again.
- _delirium 3y agoYou can definitely find it in 19th-century UK books on Google Books. Doesn't seem to be very common, but it is used in a pretty similar way to the way Indian English uses it today. From an 1833 English court opinion [1]: > This letter was immediately given by the bankrupt to the defendant, with directions that as the voyage was altered, he, the defendant, would do the needful. The opinion then spends several additional pages trying to determine what precisely was legally "needful" in this situation. [1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Law_Journal_Reports/cP9QAQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq="do+the+needful"&pg=RA3-PA211 https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Law_Journal_Reports...
- kowlo 3y agoIndian students would often sign-off their emails with variations of "Please do the needful".
- nu11ptr 3y agoAnybody who has worked with Indians for any amount of time will immediately recognize this phrase. It is very common there.
- SanjayMehta 3y agoSouth India, and I personally had never seen it before 1996. As e-mail became more prevalent after that it seems to have spread. “Kindly do the needful and revert back please” was the most common and annoying form of ending most emails.
- Blackthorn 3y agoBetween India and Pakistan, there are about as many English speakers as there are in the United States! I'd think that makes a common turn of phrase used there to be correct by consensus.
- michaelmrose 3y agoGood point, however communication is about what other people are liable to understand. To your final sentence I would append "within the context of that group of people". Usage of language is liable even in our interconnected world to diverge and this is perfectly acceptable. It is probably more meaningful yet to define whether a particular usage is useful than correct.
- philwelch 3y ago> Do the needful originated in India Really? I can't find a source on this, but my impression is that this phrase was part of Victorian English and introduced to India at that time. Like many dialectical differences between English-speaking countries however, this usage continued in India even after going extinct in Britain.
- famouswaffles 3y agoYou may be right as "do the needful" is a Nigerian phrase as well.
- comicjk 3y agoGoogle Ngram Viewer seems to agree, putting peak usage of "do the needful" in the mid-1800s. A phrase I would tend to use instead, "do what is needed", appears to be much more recent. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=do+the+needful%2Cdo+what+is+needed&year_start=1700&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=do+the+needful...
- booleandilemma 3y agoSure, and color is spelled without a "u".
- xg15 3y agoI was always reminded of Captain Picard's "Make it so." from Star Trek.
- OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago"Git 'er done!" by Larry the Cable Guy.
- mcpackieh 3y agoIt came from the English themselves, so it's as 'correct' as anything in the English language could possibly be. This phrase is used in a lot of British 19th and early 20th century books. Search site:gutenberg.org "do the needful"
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tndibona 3y agoI can’t believe no one recognised the source. It’s all from The Wren and Martin grammar book. The book was popular in colonial India and prescribed for civil servants.
- quadhome 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wren_&_Martin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wren_&_Martin and https://surendranathcollege.ac.in/new/upload/JAHIRA_HOSSAIN2021-03-07English%20Grammar%20Wren%20and%20Martin.pdf https://surendranathcollege.ac.in/new/upload/JAHIRA_HOSSAIN2... for anyone, like me, who missed this bit of history.
- avinassh 3y agoI can't find any references of 'do the needful' or just 'needful' in that linked pdf
- theduder99 3y agostep 1: acquire girlfriend step 2: do the needful
- satisfice 3y agoIt is incorrect American English, and correct Indian English. If you want to sound good to Americans that you work with, don’t use that phrase. If you work with Americans who appreciate Indian English, don’t worry about it.