Must needs? When did this happen?

 2006-11-17 19:49:15 +0000 personal

Perhaps a half-dozen times in the past week, I’ve read sentences with contain the phrase “must needs.” I have never considered this construction before; frankly, it sounds totally bizarre to my inner ear (my spiritual inner ear, that is).

Thus, it must needs be that I’ve been teleported to another world, a world in which the English language developed differently than it did in the world from which I came. This tiny grammatical gem is the only evidence of my true origin.