Anatoly Vorobey sent me a link to his Russian-language Avva post and his Stack Exchange post on the same question; I quote the latter:
A recent tweet from Senator Chuck Schumer (quoted for linguistic purposes only) says
Trump needs to sign the bill to help people and keep the government open and we’re glad to pass more aid Americans need
In this sentence, “needs” seems to be used in the sense of obligation or necessity and not personal need; Schumer is not saying that Trump’s interests require that he sign the bill, he’s saying that this is something necessary to do, that Trump should do it.
My question is: is this a relatively new meaning of the transitive verb “to need”? I seem to perceive it as recent and markedly conversational; is this intuition correct? (I’m not a native speaker).
For example, imagine a policeman saying to someone who’s agitating and panicking: “Sir, you need to calm down NOW”. This feels to me like a phrase that could be said within the last 30-40 years, say, but not in 1920.
I’m aware that “need” as a modal verb carries the meaning of impersonal obligation (“you need not do X”), but I’m asking specifically about the transitive verb.
To provide partial support, I see that the American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd edition (1994) defines the transitive sense of “need” only as “To have need of; require”, whereas the current online AHD, 5th edition adds a meaning “2. To have an obligation (to do something): You need to clean up your room.”, which pinpoints exactly the meaning I’m referring to. Is this an omission in the 1994 edition or a real indication that this meaning is relatively new?
He found the answers there unhelpful; I said “I agree with you that it feels recent, maybe in the last few decades, but of course introspection isn’t worth much in these matters.” So I’m posting it here in hopes that the Varied Reader can provide enlightenment.
but I’m asking specifically about the transitive verb.
Um, “need” is always a transitive verb…
Well, we’ve got the Corpus of Historical American English, so it should be easy enough to find out. The problem is that the semantic distinction is not that clear. The earliest candidate I could find for “you need to” as a verb of obligation is from 1875, from Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old:
Does this qualify? Considering the parallelism with “you had better”, I think it does.
It seems a perfectly normal usage to me. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to suppose that it was a new development.
I don’t think it’s conversational. I perceive it as bureaucratic jargon.
Something which State Department might say.
Or The Economist editorial.
And it’s pretty old.
“Mr. Stalin needs to get his Russian ambassador on the job at Washington, to quit playing possum over Iran, to speak plainly of Russia’s intentions, and to seek …”
(c) Oxnard Press-Courier, issue from March 15, 1946.
The Middle English Compendium has from Wycliffe:
“Where Cristene men shulden be free, now þei ben nedid to hire a preest. ”
Here nedid means “compelled”. The passive construction is awkward for me and detracts from the force. So I could well imagine another Wycliffean crawthumper saying “they need” instead of “they are needed”.????
Um, “need” is always a transitive verb…
Yeah, I should have edited that out — Anatoly just miswrote, and it muddies the waters.
Like David, I find it perfectly unremarkable.
Well, of course it’s unremarkable now; the question is how long it’s been so. I don’t recall hearing it in the ’50s or ’60s, but I’ve long since learned not to depend on my memory. If it was in use then, it certainly wasn’t as prevalent. I agree with Anatoly that a policeman saying “Sir, you need to calm down NOW” would feel like an anachronism in a movie set in 1920.
Wycliffe by PP: “Where Cristene men shulden be free, now þei ben nedid to hire a preest. ”
The corresponding phrasal verb å være nødt (til) is very common in Norwegian. The connection to the verb nøde “force, urge” is not felt. This is maybe underlined by the newish, vaguely dialectal construction må nødt (til), where nødt (til) works as an amplifyer on må “must”.
No idea about prevalence of historic distribution of the senses of “need”, but I just remembered that Sergey Dovlatov had a (minor role) character in one of his stories (Pushkin Hills) who had this word in the obligatory sense always on his tongue. He even had the nickname neednik (it’s funnier in Russian, where need doubles (triples, quadruples, etc.) as a euphemism for nature’s call and neednik is a corresponding appliance).
The OED lists about 20 intransitive forms, although to be fair they’re all listed as obsolete apart from the phrase ‘it needs’ (where there’s no actual ‘it’ involved – ‘it needs someone strong to move that handle’)
Might the usage have arisen as a modernization of the now archaic “needs must”?
I also don’t have any sense that this is novel usage, at least in my lifetime. I can imagine my mother saying “I need to go to the supermarket.”
I don’t think it’s conversational
No, it’s perfectly colloquial. If I was going to make up an example, it would be (exasperated parent to teenager): “You need to tidy your room now!”
I searched for the phrase “need to calm down” using Google Books and restricting to 19th C examples. The only one that popped up was a letter from Henry Charles Carey to Schuyler Colfax, dated 1875:
“Circulation demands to be re-established throughout the Union, and to that end we need to calm down the excitement which exists in close neighborhood of the heart ; at the same time adopting measures tending to stimulate the body and ..”
David L,
I can imagine my mother saying “I need to go to the supermarket.”
This is not the usage we are talking about… Or is it? Like I said, the line between the two meanings – “to have need of” and “must” – is thin. I would still say that this example falls under “have need”, unlike Sen. Schumer’s use.
I did some searching in google books. Have need to/had need to/are in need to/stand in need to are all common in the mid to late 17th century – need being of course a noun.
In the same era negative formulations using need as a verb are also common – no need to, none need to, will not need to.
Affirmative uses do show up occasionally, but much less often than negative.
I feel that the real difference with Anatoly’s example is that (as he notes) it’s not actually Trump doing the needing – he doesn’t benefit – and that makes it quite hard to track down in among all the more personal obligations formed in the same way (like David L’s).
There are forms with inanimate objects (‘This bill needs to be signed to benefit…’) which feel sort of similar in the sense that the need is not really the object’s – the OED’s earliest example of those seems to be from 1868: ‘The rest needs to be held tightly in the left hand’ (Billiards for Beginners)
PS- I am always annoyed when editorial writers and pundits and politicians say that someone “needs to” do something.
When a cop says, “sir, you need to calm down,” that’s a threat – “if you don’t I will cuff you and take you in.”
But when Schumer says Trump “needs to sign the bill” – or what? It’s true, bad things will happen to the country if he doesn’t. That means he should sign it, not that he “needs to.” Schumer’s leverage here is pretty close to zero.
It sounds perfectly normal to me.
“He needs a kick up the bum” (without verb) is almost there. ‘You need to pull your socks up” has the required meaning and is fine.
I think the difference here is between someone saying “to accomplish X (assumed to be something the addressee actually desires to accomplish for its own sake) you need to do Y” and someone saying “you need to do Y” meaning “I demand that you do Y for reasons of my own which you do not necessarily share.” The latter is what feels vaguely novel.
But what do we think about the usage here (from the speech Eugene Debs gave in Canton, Ohio in June 1918 that got him sent to prison for sedition until there was a change of administration and Pres. Harding let him out):
“You need to know that it is your duty to rise above the animal plane of existence. You need to know that it is for you to know something about literature and science and art. You need to know that you are verging on the edge of a great new world. You need to get in touch with your comrades and fellow workers and to become conscious of your interests, your powers, and your possibilities as a class. You need to know that you belong to the great majority of mankind.”
I think the construction does have an implication that the needer in question has a need which is more apparent from the outside than to the actual needperson him/herself; there’s a tacit “if he/she knows what’s good for him/her, (but I suspect he/she doesn’t.)”
It’s a bit like the Marxist concept of false consciousness.
“Workers of the world! You need to unite!”
[EDIT: which is what JWB just said while I was yet still typing.]
I think the difference here is between someone saying “to accomplish X (assumed to be something the addressee actually desires to accomplish for its own sake) you need to do Y” and someone saying “you need to do Y” meaning “I demand that you do Y for reasons of my own which you do not necessarily share.” The latter is what feels vaguely novel.
Yes, exactly.
That (Eugene Debs) is more ‘you need to take your medicine’, isn’t it? You Will Benefit, even if you don’t want to.
There is another reading of the original, I think, although I don’t think it was the one intended – that Trump needs to sign the bill (in order) to help people in the same way that you need to put yeast in your bread for it to rise, a simple if you don’t do A you won’t get B.
Ok, but what about my mother saying to me, “you need to finish your homework before you go to bed”? That also sounds quite cromulent to me.
A lot of times, maybe most times, this use of “need to” is imperative, like a command to someone, including cases when the person
Issuing the command has no real authority. I can say “Trump needs to cut the crap right now!”, and it will be intelligible even though my command obviously has no weight at all.
I think the sense that some among us feel to be novel involves the ascription of a need to someone else.
In cases when it seems pragmatically unlikely that the ascribees might actually feel said need on their own initiative, there is an implicature that they really ought to feel it, which is why our examples are tending to involve real, pretended or wished-for authority over the recalcitrant unacknowledger-of-need, whether they be grumpy teenager, pulled-over driver, or delinquent president.
Without a valid claim of authority, the construction is somewhere between impertinent and ridiculous. So if it really is a novelty, perhaps the change is not so much linguistic as social. Kids these days got no respect. (Or, for the dangerous ungodly Socialists amongst us: Presidents these days don’t merit no respect.)
It seems that “needs to” just became in a relevant sense the exact synonym of “has/must/ought to”. They indicate a moral responsibility without any threat or support of authority.
Something similar has happened with want, where You don’t want to do that means something like “You won’t do that if you know what’s good for you”.
The Century Dictionary (1889):
George F. Holmes, Grammar of the English Language (1871):
Something similar has happened with want, where You don’t want to do that means something like “You won’t do that if you know what’s good for you”.
An excellent parallel.
The directive use (You need to X = I want you to X) does seem novel to me, and (originally) American. Even more so “I need you to X” for “I’m ordering you to X”.
The OED dates this sense of need in negative contexts to the Wife of Bath’s Tale (late 14C): “No wys man nedeth for to wedde”. In positive contexts there are two groups: in the 14-15C there are examples like “A good phisician nediþ to loke wel a-boute and be ful ware”, but it is not clear whether the physician is obliged to do so here or whether, if he does not, he is not a good physician. But in its revival in the mid-19C we start to get impersonal examples like “The [billiards] rest needs to be held tightly in the left hand.” Finally, in 1997 the NYT is quoted as saying “In baseball, for example, is there any rule saying that a second baseman need only be in the neighborhood of second base while middle-manning a double play?” which clearly means he is obliged to (or not) by rule rather than it is some personal need of his to do so.
Another way to put it, it is a matter of an assumed need, but not by the verb’s subject.
Finally, in 1997 the NYT is quoted as saying “In baseball, for example, is there any rule saying that a second baseman need only be in the neighborhood of second base while middle-manning a double play?” which clearly means he is obliged to (or not) by rule rather than it is some personal need of his to do so.
But that is not the usage being discussed. When a cop says “you need to calm down NOW,” he’s not talking about a rule book, he’s saying “you will calm down or else.”
I agree with Anatoly that a policeman saying “Sir, you need to calm down NOW” would feel like an anachronism in a movie set in 1920.
But that’s because every copper in those days had an Irish accent.
“Ah, sir, it’s calmin’ down you’ll be doin’ now, begorra!”
The baseball use is an definitional need (like how an angle needs to be less thar ninety degrees to be acute). According to rules, the middle infielders actually needs to touch second base for it to be a double play. The quote is sarcastically asking if the rules actually says something different.
In all seriousness, I feel like a police officer addressing a civilian male as “sir” is anachronistic for the 1920s. Wouldn’t it have been “mister” (best case), if not some other appellation like “boss”, “chief”, “sport” or whatever. At least that’s my impression from old movies.
True.
Or the vaguely menacing vocative “friend.” As in “Someone said, ‘you’re in the wrong place, my friend. You’d better leave.'”
The sarcastic question about baseball rules is even more relevant in basketball. I never played, but I was a scorekeeper for my HS team in the early 60s and then again for my son’s team in the middle 80s. Especially in pro ball, games are called much more leniently now, especially WRT travelling and physical contact, but there never has been a change on the rules. Furthermore, star players get called more leniently than role players. I’m pretty sure this decision was made by owners and TV people for the purpose of making games more exciting. I don’t believe that there really was such a change in baseball, and that the guy was just bitching about scattered instances or even a single instance.
Mothers to toddlers, since forever: “Do you need to go to the bathroom?” Not an obligation, but certainly a necessity, as per Y’s quotation from the Century Dictionary.
Also, nobody has quoted Shakespeare yet, so here goes:
POLONIUS: How now, Ophelia! You need not tell us what Lord Hamlet said; We heard it all. (Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1)
Re the presence or absence of “rule books,” if the cop tells you that you need to calm down right now, the cop may well be giving you a preview of that cop’s personal interpretation, as applied to the immediate context, of one of the fuzzier rules in the relevant book, like the “don’t engage in disorderly conduct” rule, or the “don’t resist arrest” rule.
for reasons of my own
this doesn’t feel quite right to me. i think this usage is about an appeal to a categorical moral imperative (which the other person doesn’t necessarily believe in) – the debs and the schumer are both in that mode, but so is the parent/teenager example.
rozele may well be right, but largely because the sort of people who like bossing other people around tend to assume that their subjective preferences are in accord with universally-valid norms without necessarily thinking through the possibility that they might not be. This is of course exacerbated when the person being told what they need to do does not consider the teller to be a reliable authority as to what universally-valid norms may require.
The classic non-compliant rejoinder to “you need to calm down” and other statements to the same imperative effect is “don’t tell me to calm down!” and you can use that string of words to google up lots of instances in which a detached third-party observer can witness a perhaps instructive clash of governing worldviews about whether or not calmness is, in fact, reasonable or appropriate under the circumstances.
The classic non-compliant rejoinder to “you need to calm down” and other statements to the same imperative effect is “don’t tell me to calm down!”
Perhaps accompanied by “You’re not the boss of me!”
“Ah, sir, it’s calmin’ down you’ll be doin’ now, begorra!”
“ye’ll be doin’”.
A belated datum for the season:
I’m just back from a bank whose entrance is now subdivided by a rope line that funnels people past a contactless thermometer. When I started going in the exit, the woman guarding the rope told me, “I need you to come in the other side.”
And then it occurred to me that that stilted imperative and other usages like it may originate in a repressive state apparatus such as the U.S. Marine Corps, where people drive vehicles (not cars) and wear trousers and covers (not pants and hats). A part of the purpose of that apparently pointless specialization of vocabulary might be to set aside and claim control over a domain of speech and thought. Can anybody support or refute that idea, say from memories of a training session?
I looked for some early examples, and found, from 1871:
Ag. Mr Galanson, will you render me a service?
Gal. With pleasure, Count.
Ag. Then come into the Prince’s study. I need you to draw up a receipt correctly.
The crucial syntactic point is, is the object complement of need, you, with to draw up a receipt correctly added as an adjunct adverbial clause? Or is the object complement you to draw up a receipt correctly?
Perhaps, but I’d guess the most important reason is to avoid all ambiguity. Compare the strictly codified vocabulary of aviation: nobody else says aircraft. I note that vehicle, trousers, cover all have more syllables than car, pants, hat.
Peevery is probably involved, too: exactly which military vehicles qualify as “cars”, and which don’t?
ye’ll be doin — “ye” is an unfortunate respelling for /jə/ (weak-form 2-pers-sing), since “ye” /ji/ is the S+W Ireland 2-pers-plural (equivalent of N+E Ireland “yous”~”yiz”). Interesting that “yuh” is much less common than its nonrhotic analogue “yer”. Perhaps a better general rhotic respelling for /jə/ is “ya” (“howya” is good deal more common than “howye”. OTOH ya’ll is easily misread as y’all.) Or how about y’ as in y’know? But maybe y’ill instead of y’ll.
I just remembered an instance where a law enforcement officer told me that I needed to do something, and I pushed back, because I felt he was full of shit.*
It was when I was in eleventh grade. I was called out of class to meet the police officer who visited the school every week or so, and he waved photocopies of two or three letters that I had sent to a girl I had a crush on in my face. (Her mother apparently really did not like me and complained to the school. There is obviously a lot more to this story, but it’s not relevant to the linguistic point.)
At first, I was aghast, but as the officer tried to lecture me, I quickly regained my composure. After he had ranted at me for a few minutes, the key exchange near the end of our conversation proceeded approximately like this:
At that point, he briefly switched back to reiterating some boilerplate, whose relevance to the immediate situation had already been undermined by the above exchange, and then I was permitted to depart. I never heard anything about the matter again, although I no longer communicated with the girl in question in writing.
* Around the same time, one of my friends told me that the classic 1960s “Question Authority” bumper sticker motto was not strong enough for me. He said my motto should read, “Ignore Authority.”
There’s a terribly sad story in my family about a mother who called the cops on her daughter’s boyfriend. Both ended up unhappily marrying someone else and dying young at nearly the same time, and each spoke of the other on their deathbed.
Just re Jonathan Morse’s bank story, it strikes me that there’s a noticeable difference in politeness level between “you need to do X” and “I need you to do X.” The latter formulation is still functionally a command; it assumes that in context it will be obvious why the addressee ought to feel obligated to do what the speaker needs, but still seems less pushy/overbearing to my ear.
I have the opposite reaction. “I need you to do X” strikes me as more aggressive, because the speaker is asserting a kind of personal authority over the speakee. Whereas “you need to do X” implies that that there is an impersonal rule that the person ought to heed.
It depends on the context of what X is, whether it’s primarily something that is the business of the speaker or the addressee. For example, a bartender telling a soused patron, “You need to go home now” sounds like softening a demand into a suggestion that the patron might benefit from. “I need you to go home now” sounds like a demand to leave, implying that the bartender wants to get rid of the patron.
On the other hand, a boss saying “I need you to finish the Jenkins file by 4pm” sounds neutral, in an office context. “You need to finish the Jenkins file by 4pm” sounds scolding, as if the boss does not trust his underling to do his duties, and is making an intrusive personal remark.
If we’re talking “period Irish police stereotype”, surely “boyo” would be high on the list?
When was “sir” made the recommended default honorific of address by a policeperson to a member of the general public?
Google ngrams shows a slow, shallow, rise for the phrase “calm down” until about 1990, when it begins to rise more sharply, then rise even more sharply after 2000. Not sure what it means, but our stereotypical period Irish cop might say “quiet down” rather than “calm down”.
@mollymooly, thanks, I’m shocked that the writers of dialect humor in America were that careless… Does /jə/ have a schwa in stressed position too? Could it be that /jə/ and /ji/ merged to /ji/ under the influence of American English sg/pl you?
Microsoft, ever the masters of irritating verbiage, always pops up a notification on one of the computers I use at work:
“We need to fix your work account”
(An untruth, as it happens.) In this particular case, it is the “medical we” which grates most. Mind you, even that is not as bad as the annoying cutesiness of calling the logged-in user’s documents directory “My Documents.” (Could be worse: they might have gone with “My Little Documents Folder.”)
While we’re ranting — Apple, “hey” is not how I would address a stranger, or even a simulated impersonal servant.
Searching Google Books for the phrase “you need to calm down” finds no hits at all, zero (0), before 1981.
1981: “Violent Behavior: Social Learning Approaches to Prediction, Management, and Treatment”
1984: Handbook of Emergency Psychiatry
1989: Treatments of Psychiatric Disorders: A Task Force Report of the American Psychiatric Association, Volume 2
1992: What You Need to Know About– Masons
1993: Star Quality
1994: Essential Turgenev
1996: The Rescue 911: Family First Aid & Emergency Care Book
I would suggest that perhaps the phrase “you need to calm down” entered the world of psychologists and psychiatric therapists in the 1980s, and then spread to the broader world of fiction writers and common speech (perhaps via interactions with therapists?).
You can find more if you look for a phrase in Google ngrams, then click on one of the ranges below, and adjust the dates to taste. I haven’t investigated to see what extra stuff that adds to the search urls. There is an example from the 1946 anthology, Soviet Scene: Six Plays of Russian Life:
Another play, from Soviet Literature Monthly, #9 (1959):
From Jean Malaquais’ World without Visa (1948):
All mere snippets of some fine, fine literary writing.
perhaps via interactions with therapists
Interesting thought. In fact, there may be a conceptual connexion between this and the “medical we” that I moaned about just above: in both cases, someone is inappropriately claiming privileged access to the realm of another person’s “I”, instead of using the correctly distanced “you.” In the case of “medical we” this is quite explicit; in the case of the use of “need” that we have been discussing, the speaker is impertinently implying that they have access to the internal desires and needs of the person addressed.
It reminds me (by contrast) of the way in Japanese you say (the equivalent of) “I am sad” but not “he is sad”; only “he seems sad”, reflecting the fact that we have direct access only to our own emotions.
But we have direct experience of behavior. The notion of emotions is a red herring whose purpose is to bait people into discussions about “access”, and thus distract attention from behavior. By simply saying “you are a sad-ass”, I exhibit behavior that avoids access-discussions, although not retaliation. To soften the blow (that might be coming my way), I might say “you sure are acting like a sad-ass”. It’s all about skirting around impudence and fisticuffs, not “access”.
So it has been established that the phrase “You need to calm down” originated with Turgenev and then transmitted by Stalinist entities to American psychiatry and then into the popular language, right?
Turgenev is certainly to blame. I think we can all agree on that. The rest is insignificant detail. It is conceivable that more than one pathway may have been involved.
The notion of emotions is a red herring whose purpose is to bait people into discussions about “access”
Hah! You fell for my cunning provocation!
the 1946 anthology, Soviet Scene: Six Plays of Russian Life
I found a quietly devastating review by Francis J. Whitfield (American Slavic and East European Review 6:1-2 [May 1947], p. 200) that begins:
I’ve found the Russian original of Y’s Dzherzhinsky/Zabelin dialogue; it’s from Pogodin’s “intrinsically uninteresting” Кремлевские куранты [Chimes of the Kremlin]. Here’s the original followed by my translation:
Note that “calm down” was an artifact of the very unsatisfactory translation, which not only distorted the original but omitted a couple of sentences. And clearly “You need to collect your thoughts” is not an order but a plain statement of fact.
Another play, from Soviet Literature Monthly, #9 (1959)
I’m confused by this. Apparently the only play in the September 1959 “Children’s Issue” of the journal was Sergei Mikhalkov’s Sombrero, but that play’s list of characters is:
No Irina or Lenin. Dead end!
a quietly devastating review
Reminds me of Henry Sweet on the Ormulum:
“Of the literary merits of the Ormulum little can be said, for it has none whatever. The author was in fact a spelling-reformer and philologist who mistook his vocation.”
It’s very strange. I wondered if the difference was the capitalization of “You”, or the period after “down.”, but that doesn’t seem to be it. Capitalizing “You” makes no difference: I see no hits before 1981. When there is a period after “down”, it says “No valid ngrams to plot!”
The date range is from 1800-2019.
When I change the corpus to “English Fiction”, I get slightly different results in the ngram (a rise between 1908 and 1913, and again between 1951 and 1956), but not in Google Books.
When I change the date range in Google Books to 1900-1960, I get the hits before 1981, including those posted by Y.
Looks like there’s a weird bug.
There are books dated to 1911 (Nemalorn, by Corina Lanemann) and 1957 (Rock Bottom, by Shane Adams), but these are mistakes; the copyright pages clearly say 2011. Another (The One That I Want, by Donna Hill, Zuri Day, Cheris Hodges (looks like a collection of three works by three writers)) is dated to 1949, and doesn’t have a date on the copyright page (really, it just says “Copyright Page”, and nothing else), but I am confident this too is an error: the first line talks about the character pointing a car fob at a white Infiniti, and the character listening for the beep.
Bugs, bugs, bugs.
@hat
Mikhail Shatrov was writing plays about Lenin in late 1950s-early 1960s. I thought the text could be from “the Peace of Brest Litovsk”, but none of the listed characters in the eponymous film is an irina.
No Irina or Lenin. Dead end!
I am a bad bibliographer. The volume digitized at GB was marked as issues 9–12 (with this excerpt on p. 38 of whichever issue). It would be one of the others, then.
Owlmirror: Google Books is a disgrace. A bunch of libraries trusted it to host their holdings, and after the initial excitement, it has been kept at minimum maintenance. Searching, improved OCR, improved user interface, metadata bugs, copyright restrictions—none of these are getting any attention. 0.1% of Alphabet’s budget would do wonders for it, but no one is interested. I hope some day they will spin it off as a competent non-profit, but no one there is asking me. Or at least, maybe the libraries will get together and start a useful alternative (such as Hathi Trust is not).
Huff… huff… I need to calm down.
Not everybody follows Sweet’s line on the Ormulum! There’s at least one medievalist out there who loves it for itself, not its spelling. Here’s her defense of Orm against bad transcriptions and dismissive treatment.
Another play
Found it! It’s Pogodin’s «Третья, патетическая» [The third, Pathétique], the last in his trilogy of Lenin plays; here’s the original:
The translation above is OK, except that I’d render “вам надо успокоиться” as “you have to calm down” or “you ought to calm down,” precisely to avoid confusion with the new sense of “you need to.”
@Y: Google largely lost interest in Google Books after it became clear that the American legal system was not going to let them operate the project the way the company had originally wanted to. I think this is unfortunate, but no aspect of it is really surprising.
What I do find surprising is the kinds of bugs that crop up when using it. Last week, I was trying to find instances of a particular expression in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The string was rare enough in the early years that there was never more than a single appearance of it every few decades. However, the year that the n-gram viewer would show the expression being found could be as much as four years away from where Google Books actually located it. (For example, the viewer might show a spike in 1864, but if I searched in 1864 publications, it found nothing; only by expanding my search temporally did I find that the actual appearance was in 1866—at least according to the metadata, which is not itself necessarily accurate.) And in one instance, a direct Google Books search couldn’t find the source that the n-gram viewer was showing at all!
Here’s another interesting Zabelin, with portrait by Repin (q.v.)
Brett: I think there’s more to it, judging from what happened to Google’s Usenet archives. In that case, there was no question at any point of making money off it; it was a side project, aimed at preserving internet history for the public benefit. They bought, to some fanfare, an early archive, going back to the 1980s, before Google itself had existed. For a while you could browse it and search it, first with ease, then with difficulty, then not at all. I suspect the do-gooders at Google got sidelined, and that affected Google Books as well; not as badly, because there’s still some monetization to be had, especially off of newer books. But even with current restrictions, like snippet views and the like, they could do so much better.
One of the odder bugs, btw, is that a book that might appear on a search for, say, books published between 1850 and 1900, would not appear on a search betwween 1800 and 1900. That happens a lot.
Here’s another interesting Zabelin, with portrait by Repin
Now, that’s an impressive beard.
Not everybody follows Sweet’s line on the Ormulum!
Sweet was not known for the sweet moderation of his views. As WP says:
“He had done poorly as a student at Oxford, he had annoyed many people through bluntness, and he failed to make every effort to gather official support. His relationship with the Oxford University Press was often strained.”
I have to say that I can see what Sweet meant though. The great positive of the Ormulum compared with the Ancren Wisse (the other text Sweet includes in his primer) it that it’s a hell of a lot easier (which seems to be a large part of its charm for Carla María Thomas: and who shall blame her?)
Reminds me of… the Wikipedia article on the Orrmulum! It used to say something quite similar about nobody having ever claimed it has literary value (followed by some tag or other in brackets). The current version is more conciliatory:
From the author’s self-description:
“It’s good to be a Floridian again.”
2014. Those were the times. Nowadays, the Florida Man is governed by Wrong DeathSatan…
But the blog post leads to this tweet:
“#Ormulum is often believed to be the dullest text ever written in English. Scholarly interest has mostly focused on its language. #OrmLOVE”
The actual defense is in this post:
“Sure, Orm’s work can be boring and more than tedious to read, but look at the absolute passion we find when we actually pay attention.
It’s beautiful.”
Here’s Google Books hit where the implication of obligation of “need” is noted and definitely disappreciated:
2000: Labor Arbitration Reports – Volume 113
A great illustration and an excellent find!
Overall I would trust the hand-curated metadata of Google Ngrams over the 100+ metadata providers used by Google Books, where in order to be safe Google believes the latest publication date.
@John Cowan: I was not under the impression they were different. The former is, after all, actually the Google Books Ngram Viewer.
I think the difference here is between someone saying “to accomplish X (assumed to be something the addressee actually desires to accomplish for its own sake) you need to do Y” and someone saying “you need to do Y” meaning “I demand that you do Y for reasons of my own which you do not necessarily share.” The latter is what feels vaguely novel.
The trouble is, it doesn’t sound novel to me. Are you sure you’re not being affected by the recency illusion?
“You need to pull your head in” doesn’t sound at all novel to me.
“Need” has the meaning “necessary”. It has for a long time. When economists talk about “needs” and “wants”, they are talking about the difference between necessities and luxuries. So telling someone they need to pull their head in is stating that it is necessary for them to pull their head in.
“People like that need to be taken in hand” means that it is necessary for people like that to be taken in hand.
Or, …. is this is a usage that has spread into American English more recently, making American speakers feel that it is “new”?
The former is, after all, actually the Google Books Ngram Viewer.
By name only. I was at Google when Ngrams was still unreleased, where I heard a talk and asked a number of questions about it. The speaker said it amounted to about 1 BNC per year (from books only, of course). Only later when it became a product rather than a “lab” was it classified as part of Google Books.
Morgenbesser: “Let me see if I understand your thesis. You think we shouldn’t anthropomorphize people?”