Sam Gentle.com

Shoulding

In my post about backwards verbs I noticed that many of our emotional verbs – like "inspire" or "upset" – have the person feeling the emotion as the object, rather than the subject. That is, you're not feeling the emotion about someone, rather someone else is makefeeling you. But today I found a fun opportunity to run that transformation the other way: the word should.

In Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, "should" is considered a pathological word; it doesn't express anything about the actual goals or requirements motivating you to do the thing, rather it is just a judgement, or a way of inducing guilt. Instead of saying "I should work out more", CBT encourages you to turn that into something like "I want to work out more", which is a similar idea without the judgement.

But I think it would also be interesting to do some verb-reversing to it. What if, instead, you should a person? That is, you give them the feeling that there is some obligation that they aren't meeting. For example, telling someone "you should smile more" is actually you shoulding them. With this form of the verb, the person attempting to create the obligation is the subject, rather than the object. It is usually considered pretty rude to should someone.

Shoulding also provides you with an interesting framework for breaking down "I should..." type statements. After you think "I should exercise", you could follow that up with the realisation that "exercise is shoulding me". Or, perhaps more accurately, "I am shoulding myself about exercise". Separately to analysing your actual motivations for the exercise, you could also consider why this particular activity has caused shoulding.

I don't want to should you by saying you shouldn't should, but this new form of the verb has the benefit of separating your motivations from obligations so you can deal with them both individually.

Or, at least, it should.