"Can / May I ask you a question?"

[Wilson Gray]

All that's good, Mark. But what you say is rather beside the point.
Off the top of your head, can you come up with any other yes-no
question in English which *necessarily* precludes even the theoretical
possibility that the person spoken to can exercise his God-given right
to answer "No"? Asking permission to perform this action entails
performing the action, irrespective of whether the person spoken to
wants to grant permission.I find that mind-bending! If someone were to
ask the perhaps somewhat more-threatening version, "May I question
you?", the person spoken to can easily, if he has the 'nads, answer,
"Damn the consequences! I say 'No!', sir! I deny you your
ignorant-arsed request! My desire not to be annoyed trumps your desire
to annoy me!"

But yes, I do understand the point that that characteristic of (only?)
this yes-no question may fail to fire the imaginations of younger but
more-learned members of our little community, given that, in the real
world, people freely give a negative answer to this question, as they
will:

A) May I ask you a question?

B) No.

A) All right. Fuck you, then.

AFAIK, there's no other such question in English that falls so
trippingly from the tongue as "Can / May I ask you a question?"
Someone may be able to construct another such, but IMO, it'll take
some effort, if it can even be done. Indeed, is it possible to ask
this question in this form in any human language without eliminating
the possibility of "No" as the answer, even though it's a yes-no
question?

And would you really be snarky enough to answer a polite "Excuse me"
with a snotty "For what?" Mark, you know that that's not you! Well, I
guess that you could smile and use a pleasant tone of voice tending
toward gallantry without being offensive. ;-)

-Wilson

All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
-Mark Twain



On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 12:55 PM, Mark Mandel <thnidu at gmail.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Mark Mandel <thnidu at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "Can / May I ask you a question?"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 11:12 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'd accept Excuse me; Can / Will / Would you help me? Are you familiar
>> with this library? or even Do you work here?, etc. (Widener has no
>> dress code for the lower orders. Hence, there's no way to know whether
>> a random person encountered in the stack is a staff member able to
>> share knowledge or merely another lost soul.) *Anything* other than
>> the mind-bending whatever-it-is-ness of Can / May I ask you a
>> question?
>
> I disagree. You don't answer "Excuse me" with "For what?", because
> unless the person has just bumped into you, you know that this is a
> formula to politely request your attention, whether to notice that you
> are in their way and move, or to preface a question or request. When a
> co-worker you know only casually asks "How ya doin'?" in the morning
> as you're both going into the work place, you don't *tell* them how
> you're doing: you say "Pretty good" or "Not bad" or "Could be worse"
> or "Same old same old", or something equally brief and summative, and
> not necessarily true.
>
> "Can I ask you a question?" is a similar formula. It means "I'd like
> to ask you a question, and I'm getting your attention and asking your
> permission." Don't take it literally.
>
> I used to answer, "You just did. Care to ask another?" But that made a
> road bump in the discourse instead of smoothing the way, which is what
> conventional formulas are meant for, and I decided I was just being a
> literalist old fart. It's an idiom that has developed since our
> childhood, and we'd better get with it.
>
> Mark Mandel
>
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