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A professor of English from English and foreign language university corrected "do the needful" as "do what is necessary. some others say "do what needs to be done" I hope the native speakers of English will respond to my question and talk about the acceptability of all these expressions

Edit: it is not a duplicate because I wanted to know whether the expression is acceptable to native speakers.I did not ask why such an expression is asked instead of a question

Jvlnarasimharao
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    The comments below the question should have been retained. – Jvlnarasimharao Aug 31 '19 at 02:18
  • I think this is the perfect answer for its simplicity and being factually correct: [*British native speakers would normally say ‘Please do whatever is necessary’ instead of ‘Please do the needful’ (although ‘needful’ has been used as a noun since the fourteenth century)*](https://english.stackexchange.com/a/43610/44619) – Mari-Lou A Aug 31 '19 at 10:01

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The interesting comments show this question to be a great example of regional differences in English usage. Generally speaking, a variant from one region won't have relevance to equivalent expressions from other regions. I have NOT heard "do the needful" as standard US English. However, television has popularized the expressions "just do it" and "make it so," which are probably equivalent.

Edward Barnard
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