How 'Must' Became Law

Tiny, everyday verbs like must, should, may, ought, have to, and need to function as subtle carriers of authority

While we often look to statutes and formal rules to understand the boundaries of our world, the most pervasive constraints are not announced in proclamations; they are whispered in our grammar. Tiny, everyday verbs like must, should, may, ought, have to, and need to function as subtle carriers of authority. They rarely sound like commands, yet they delineate what is required, what is permitted, and what is off-limits. These words are powerful because they work best when unnoticed, slipping obligation into a sentence as if it were an immutable part of reality. They seldom name who made the rule and conveniently omit the penalty for its violation.

This quiet utility makes them indispensable to any system that desires compliance without confrontation. We find them in the dense boilerplate of contracts and HR manuals, but also in the moral syntax of sermons, the hierarchical lessons of colonial textbooks, and the frictionless agreements of app terms of service.

To understand how these verbs became such effective, silent governors is to understand something essential about the nature of power itself. By learning to read them critically, we gain the ability to question the structures they uphold.

The story begins with a clerical shortcut that remade the language of law. In early English, duty was typically assigned by a named authority. A decree would state plainly,

“The king commands every tenant to deliver grain.”

But by the 1200s, scribes had found a more efficient formulation:

“Every tenant shall deliver grain at Michaelmas.”

In this subtle grammatical shift, a profound political change occurred. The figure of the king, with his specific, personal authority, receded from the text, but his command remained, now embedded in the very structure of the sentence. The verb shall absorbed the power of the sovereign. This innovation persists today; modern policies are replete with agentless rules, and the first critical question we can ask when reading them is who, exactly, benefits from leaving the decision-maker’s name out.

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This external command soon found an internal counterpart. The word ought began its life as a simple synonym for owe. In early legal contexts, to “ought silver” meant, quite literally, that one had an unpaid debt. It was a word of tangible, external obligation. But theologians and preachers, seeking a language for conscience, stretched the term. A financial debt owed to a merchant became a moral debt owed to God or society: you ought to pray; you ought to obey.

By the time the factory era dawned, this internalized command was fully formed. A worker ought to arrive early and never complain—no overseer needed to be present for the rule to be felt. Duty had transformed into a private guilt, a burden you carry alone. When we hear ought today, we are hearing the echo of this history, and it is worth asking whose expectation we are shouldering, and why.

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As English shed its older, more complex verb endings, a new suite of softer, more bureaucratic phrases appeared. Where a command might once have been explicit, now there were normalized facts:

“Employees have to clock in by six.”

“You need to fill out this form.”

The language presents the rule not as an order from a person, but as a precondition for reality to proceed as scheduled. It sounds like a simple statement of fact, but the penalty for ignoring it—job loss, a denied claim—is entirely real. This tone was perfectly suited to the logic of the punch-clock and the assembly line: a system of steady, pervasive control framed as the normal state of affairs. When a "fact" functions to control behavior, we should treat it as a rule and endeavor to trace its source.

Frictionless for Whom?

The British Empire exported this grammatical toolkit across the globe. In colonial schools, students were drilled on a simple, rigid hierarchy of modal verbs: must was an absolute command, should was firm advice, and may was permission granted from above. This was more than a grammar lesson; it was an education in obedience, training students to hear and internalize a fixed structure of authority.

The legacy of this education is still audible. In many former colonies, the word must retains its hard, unyielding edge. Conversely, in the United Kingdom or the United States, where rules were more often issued than imposed, must has softened, frequently signaling a mere inference or a strong guess, as in

“He left hours ago; he must be tired.”

The sharpness of a verb often depends on its history of enforcement.

This impulse to codify authority reached its zenith in the mid-20th century, when philosophers of logic attempted to translate these messy concepts into formal symbols.

Georg Henrik von Wright, a pioneer in this field of "deontic logic," proposed a system where □p meant “It is obligatory that p,” and ◇p meant “It is permitted that p.” But real life, with its clashing rules and contextual nuances, quickly broke the model.

Ross’s paradox famously demonstrated the problem: if you accept the rule "You ought to mail the letter," logic dictates that you must also accept "You ought to mail the letter or burn it"—a permission that the original rule-giver certainly did not intend. This reveals a fundamental truth: bureaucracy punishes disobedience, not logical inconsistency. Power cares about compliance, not elegance.

Nowhere is this truer than in the digital architecture of the checkbox. Nearly every app’s Terms of Service includes a variation of the line:

“Users must comply with all applicable laws.”

The single word must delegates sweeping interpretive power to the platform. Which laws? Who is the arbiter of compliance? With one click on a box labeled “I agree,” a modal verb silently replaces the deliberation of a courtroom. It is the culmination of the trend that began centuries ago: authority that is placeless, instantaneous, and accepted without argument.

Before clicking, it is wise to scan for must, shall, or the tell-tale phrase “we reserve the right.” That is where enforcement hides.

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These tiny verbs, then, run vast systems. Shall learned to hide a king’s order. Ought moved debt from the ledger to the conscience. Have to made factory discipline feel like a fact of life. And click-wrap must automates discipline at a global scale.

But none of this is immutable. These instruments of power were constructed, taught, and normalized, which means they can be deconstructed, questioned, and re-evaluated. The first step is to cultivate a new kind of literacy—to read with our eyes open to these subtle coercions.

• We can put the people back into the sentence, transforming “Equipment shall be returned” into the more honest “Supervisors require staff to return equipment.”

• We can ask for the source of a policy and who has the power to change it.

• We can reserve hard modals like must for true non-negotiables, like safety, and use gentler terms for routine requests.

Language alone will not topple power, but it will always reveal where power hides. And once we see its hiding place, we can ask the one question that every system of automatic compliance hopes to silence:

Says who?

Sometimes, that is the beginning of a better answer.