"Can / May I ask you a question?"

Wed Dec 3 03:23:24 UTC 2008

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"?

How about "Can you say no to this question?" - theoretically

Tom Zurinskas, USA - CT20, TN3, NJ33, FL5+
Learn truespel in 15 minutes at  http://tinypaste.com/76f44


> Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2008 21:36:53 -0500
> From: Berson at ATT.NET
> Subject: Re: "Can / May I ask you a question?"
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: "Joel S. Berson"
> Subject: Re: "Can / May I ask you a question?"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 12/1/2008 04:07 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>>Content-Disposition: inline
>>
>>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"?
>
> Are you alive?
> Are you awake?
>
> Joel
>
>>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  wrote:
>>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>>> Sender: American Dialect Society
>>> Poster: Mark Mandel
>>> Subject: Re: "Can / May I ask you a question?"
>>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>
>>> On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 11:12 PM, Wilson Gray  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
>>>
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>>
>>
>>------------------------------------------------------------
>>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
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