Home > Must, should, or ought to? CATEGORI Must, should, or ought to? TRENDING A woman’s place is in the bosom of her family; her thoughts ought seldom to emerge from it. The Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany, Volume 97, 1825 Those...
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Home > Must, should, or ought to? CATEGORI Must, should, or ought to? TRENDING A woman’s place is in the bosom of her family; her thoughts ought seldom to emerge from it. The Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany, Volume 97, 1825 Those nineteenth-century moralists! Can you imagine what today’s world would have been like if women such as Florence Nightingale, Emmeline Pankhurst, or Harriet Beecher Stowe had confined their thoughts to family life? While the viewpoint behind it may be outdated, this famous quotation is a neat way of A!ect or e!e illustrating one of the main uses of ought, namely expressing the speaker’s view as to a correct or dutiful course of action, often imbued with a tinge of social rectitude. As you may know, ought is a special type of verb known as a modal verb: I’ve covered some of these already in earlier blogs. I’d now like to turn my attention to a trio of modals which share a similar range of meanings: must, ought, and should. All these verbs can be used t
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