3 ms·
> 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
by 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...