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Comment by BonnieBrown | Hacker News Reader

I am an American in California working as a Project Manager at a small ~30 person eCommerce "engine" startup. One of my new colleagues on the PM team is a very nice Indian girl and she always says "do the needful" in JIRA tickets and in general email communication. Before she joined the team about 2 months ago I never once in my life heard anyone in America say "do the needful". I am American and have lived here my entire life. I always thought the saying was slightly funny and almost "cute" in that no native American English speaker ever describes tasks to be done as being "needful".

Where did that saying come from in India?

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Likely of British origin, during the Raj. I can imagine "Kindly do the needful, old chap" scrawled in the margin of an official missive, as it languidly flitted from one administrative table to another.

Many such anachronisms exist; thankfully, they're dying out one by one. A few decades ago (in the last century, to be precise), it wasn't very uncommon for official letters to be signed off with "I remain, Sir, your obedient servant". Later, it was shortened to "yours obediently"; it vanished altogether, thankfully.

It's a perfectly cromulent phrase!

It comes partly from the language, bureaucracy uses and expects in communication, given India's socialist history , weak market place pre 92 and strong presence of government owned businesses even today , it likely many of the their parents and grandparents worked in the bureaucracy, so it also learnt and home and also schools are poor at teaching soft skills like written communication or anything which won't help you ace exams and get a job.

It is also partly from workplace culture and what their mentors and bosses did when they were junior, somewhat akin to the polite language you hear in the U.S. South. You can pick up mannerisms easily, when you are not sure what is the right way to behave.

Not sure exactly what its origins are, but it's standard Indian English. It's a legitimate dialect of English, just like standard American English has its own unique idioms like "grandfathered in" (a term that has extremely racist origins).

I'm always learning. I truly thought that the term was probably centuries old and had something to do with family legacy, old rules being followed to keep tradition, etc. You live, you learn.

I often hear people use the phrase "call a spade a spade", thinking it's saying "if a card shows a spade, call it as a spade (when showing the hand)", but I've heard for a long time that phrase is also racist. Not growing up around anyone who ever used that phrase, I would have had no idea.

Makes me wonder how many other phrases out there in every day use don't have a happy meaning, even though at first glance they might seem innocuous.

The spade phrase is from ancient greece with 500 years of use in the english language. Don't know how it could be racist.

The spade is question is a digging tool.

It could be mistaken for a racist expression by somebody who knows 'spade' as a racial slur for black people.

Similar to "chink in one's armor. A "chink" means "a narrow opening or crack", and a chink in one's armor means a weak point that makes you vulnerable to attack.

But "chink" is also an offensive term for a Chinese person, so "chink in one's armor" can be misunderstood, especially if what you are talking about actually involves a Chinese person. ESPN got in trouble a couple of times with it, even though they had used it thousands of times before without incident, because of a couple articles where the weakness they were describing on some team was a player who was Chinese.

Niggardly is another such word. It has no relation to the racial slur, originating in the Old Norse "nigla", but it would be unwise to use it today.

Wait, grandfathered in is racist? How?

Edit, for other's curious, as the person I'm replying to said, it's not racist per se, but has its origins in racist practice:

> The term originated in late nineteenth-century legislation and constitutional amendments passed by a number of U.S. Southern states, which created new requirements for literacy tests, payment of poll taxes, and/or residency and property restrictions to register to vote. States in some cases exempted those whose ancestors (grandfathers) had the right to vote before the American Civil War, or as of a particular date, from such requirements. The intent and effect of such rules was to prevent African-American former slaves and their descendants from voting, but without denying poor and illiterate whites the right to vote.

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