"Can / May I ask you a question?"

[Wilson Gray]

Mark, may I ask you a question?

Can you not see that, when I ask you for permission to ask you a
question, whether you would choose to allow me to ask you a question
or whether you would choose not to allow me to ask you a question is
of no consequence? I have already asked you a question by virtue of
the very speech act of asking you for permission to ask you ask you a
question. It's already too late. The war is over before you've even
had a chance to "LOCK! One round, LOAD!" Game, set, and match to the
questioner.

-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 4:20 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 Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 4:07 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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"?
>
> Outside a rest room: "Is there anyone in there?"
>
>> Asking permission to perform this action entails
>> performing the action, irrespective of whether the person spoken to
>> wants to grant permission.
>
> Would you prefer "May I ask you a substantive question?"?
>
>> 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. ;-)
>
> Of course not. I sometimes *do* reply politely "Not at all!" --
> meaning, and taken to mean, "It's no trouble at all (and so I don't
> feel that you've done anything that requires any kind of apology).
>
> But my point was that we shouldn't take literally that which is not
> meant literally. How do you feel about indirect speech acts like "Can
> you pass the butter?" or (from one's spouse) "I think someone's at the
> door"? I don't recommend replying, respectively, "Yes" (and not doing
> so), or especially "Yes, I think you're right" and not moving.
>
> Mark
>
>> 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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