Might Could, Might Should

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Patricia McNulty, and I’m speaking to you from Virginia Beach, Virginia.

Well, welcome, Patricia. What can we do for you?

I have a question. I actually grew up in Michigan and then spent some time in Europe and then was in Massachusetts.

And then I moved down in the late 80s to Richmond, Virginia, and I started hearing a lot of things there that kind of stuck in my Midwestern ear the wrong way.

And there’s a couple of expressions I’ve been wondering about ever since then.

And one of them is the use of might could together or might should.

And it’s usually used in a setting like, well, we might could do that, or I might should go to the store today, or something along those lines.

And then I started thinking about the people that said that, and I sort of centered on this friend of mine named Jane.

And I was wondering if it was maybe a family thing of hers, or if that particular expression is more widely used in the area.

So it’s not something that you’ve heard in Massachusetts?

No, no, absolutely not.

And have you heard it anywhere else outside of Virginia?

No, only here.

And Patricia, does it mean the same thing as might or should?

Or does it have a nuance of meaning is what I’m wondering.

No, it just seems like an overuse of two words stuck together.

And either one of them would have been fine all by itself.

Is Jane’s family particularly Southern?

Yes.

Her father was born and raised in Richmond,

And her mom actually grew up on a tobacco farm just south of Petersburg, Virginia.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it, Martha?

Oh, yes.

We both were thinking here.

I know what Martha’s thinking.

I can read her mind on this one.

One of her lobes of her brain.

You can always read my mind.

Well, we’ve talked about this on the show.

It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?

There’s something about the settlement patterns of the American South that brought over from the north of England and Scotland a bunch of linguistic traits.

And this is one of them.

And it’s called multiple modals, M-O-D-A-L-S.

And modals are helping verbs that express things like possibility, capability, likelihood, permission, or obligation.

They affect a verb’s grammatical mood.

So these are helping verbs like can or may or might or shall or should or will or would, things like that.

And what happens is you do pair them up exactly like you said.

So you’re very observant.

You notice that might, could, and might, should are very common examples.

But there are others like might can or may used to or may should or should ought or used to could.

And all of these together are used usually to add a little more nuance.

That’s why Martha was asking that question.

Sometimes it’s hard to puzzle it out and maybe the nuance isn’t always there.

For example, if I said to you, we might could go out for dinner tonight.

It sounds a little less direct than we might go out for dinner tonight or we could go out for dinner tonight.

It’s perhaps more likely to receive by you as a suggestion rather than a direct request.

It’s just a little more graduated, a little more subtle, usually.

Does that make some sense, Patricia?

Yeah, it does.

It’s funny because I actually called Jane this morning and we were discussing this very thing.

And she wasn’t even aware that she was saying it.

Then a little later in our conversation, she said something about, oh, yeah, Mike could go to lunch next week.

I said, Jane, do you realize you just said it?

Yeah.

So, yeah, if she said we could go to lunch next week, that sounds kind of vague and maybe she doesn’t really mean it.

But Mike could sounds a little more certain, doesn’t it?

Yeah.

I think it does anyway.

But you really won’t hear this much outside of the American South.

You will.

It’s sprinkled here and there, but generally it’s far more common in the American South,

Particularly where people from the north of England and Scotland settled many years ago.

That’s really interesting.

Well, Patricia, thanks for your call.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

It was really fun.

Bye-bye.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, maybe you moved to a different part of the country and something caught your ear.

Let us know about it, 877-929-9673, or send the story to us in email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.