Hello,
I can’t get my head around the grammar of the famous saying “Needs must when the devil drives”. I know it harks back to the times of Shakespeare, it was coined when Grammar was very different.
I heard that “needs must” is an elliptical form of “one needs must go”
I gleaned from the context that “one needs must go” probably mean “one must go”. Then what is the purpose of “needs must”? Did the people of that time use “needs must” in lieu of “must”?
Like “thou needs must do thee job”?
Thanks!
Tortie, I can’t actually understand that sentence at all, and in fact I can’t understand “needs must go”, because it sounds ungrammatical and nonsensical to me.
I can say, however, that in some English dialects, such as in Scotland and Tennessee, people will use two modals in the same clause. So they might say, “If you’d sit down, I might can see the TV.” This is totally bad grammar in modern standard English, but it goes back to an earlier form of the language.
Thank you Jamie!
I agree that “needs must” sounds bizzare, even to me.
By the way, is the expression “Needs must when the devil drives” popular in your neck of the woods?
It looks like ‘‘needs’’ is a noun in the saying in question, and not a verb/modal, though.
Ha, ha… If you said it in my neck of the woods, people would say, “WHAT?” and they’d wonder if you were psychotic or taking LSD.