Just How Needful Is It?

Kindly do the needful. Is needful a word? Isn't it spelt 'necessary' and pronounced 'necessary' - do we really need 'mindful's' bastard younger brother turning up as a hungry understudy to an already well established perfectly adequate lead?

The thing that infuriates me most about it, isn't that it's use replaces another more appropriate word, it's that 'kindly do the needful' is entirely superfluous if it's left on it's own at the end of an email. Because presumably - you've already asked someone to do the necessary in one of the preceding sentences or your correspondent will have literally no idea what the needful is. So you're simply repeating a command that you've already given. What you're suggesting is that the recipient might have such a basic intellect that your original request of "please ensure that the main brace is spliced, and the rigging is taut" (yes today's rant is pirate themed) has been misconstrued as nonspecific theoretical musing, intended for nothing more than igniting inspiration. But it's ok though because you followed it up with "please do the needful". Disaster averted. Pirate ship saved. Congratulations.

Actually it's not even that. That's the way language is going these days. We're still in a global recession and we have to keep these otherwise redundant letters in a job, else they'll start hanging round on street corners and start forming text speak or abbreviations of television shows, because as we all know there simply isn't time to say all the practically innumerable syllables in 'Game of Thrones'. No - it's not the eyeball-rolling farcical pointlessness of it that truly shivers me timbers (see, continuity, even if it's been transparently crowbarred in), it's that at the end of a particularly mundane email, if I'm not in full control of my faculties, I find myself motioning to type it. Then follows hours of soul searching and self loathing, doing the needful examination of the self, resolving that if you can't beat them: start making up your own entirely convoluted nonsensical throw-away buzz phrases. Sometimes I like to try and fill a whole email with them if I really fancy a challenge:

Dear Sir / Madam / otherness

I recommend although cannot insist that you be receptive to the following coordination.

Following the happenstances of whence, further investigation had been deemed as potentially both viable and beneficial.

I trust that you will ensure that all appropriate measures will be considered and discussed amongst you, yourself and thy. And that these measures are In fact measures and not rude limericks written in really small writing on grains of rice.

Yours evidently

The ministry of ministrations