Dirk Elzinga wrote:
>At 1:24 AM -0500 03/18/02, David Peterson wrote:
>>It's certainly a (literary only) archaism to older American ears like
mine;
>>quite likely utterly unknown to many of the Younger Generation (Mr. E.
Lash
>>excluded!) 8-)))>> Wrote Roger...
>>
>>??? I'm young. All young Americans seem to know this. We all are forced
to
>>study a Shakespeare play a year. The phrase is the subject of fun, and
>>because of that, hardly not unheard of. However, it's never used
seriously,
>>and probably understood to mean "an old way to say 'must'"--that's the way
I
>>understood it, until now. How does "needs" mean "absolutely"? Any idea
as
>>to the history?
>
>Maybe Roger's point was not that younger Americans wouldn't
>*recognize* the construction, but that they wouldn't be able to use
>it appropriately.
Thank you, Dirk, for clarifying my (as too often) fuzzy verbiage......
Rather than exempting only E.Lash, I should have said "all Listmembers", who
are, of course, above average on the scale of linguistic sophistication.