Also, for example, why not in the sense of OK (”Alright. Why not. Let’s go.”) seems to call for a period or an exclamation point rather than a question mark.

Sometimes interrogative words are simply used as intensives, as in How wonderful! or Why, we’re married, of course! Likewise, I suppose, would you or will you can be used as intensives as well.

With respect to opening lines in corporate communications, what is worrisome is that the larger the organization, the more people would have been involved in the drafting and editing (it would have been “run by” them). So I guess the deck is stacked against coherence.

I remember sitting in a mahogany gilded conference room with a lot of high priced lawyers and consultants and client executives and huge time was spent debating whether the sentence “Would you please respond directly to our Shareholder Relations Department” required a question mark at the end. The argument hinged on the fact that although the sentence was worded as a question, it was really a demand. Finally the boss seemed to remember something his fifth grade teacher told them about interrogatives and, mercifully, the question mark stayed.

That’s a dumb question, of course, but people ask lots of dumb questions even without trying to be funny. Like when they ask whether we know or have the time. And Could you tell me the time? is like asking whether we could pass the avocado spread. (We certainly could, but perhaps we don’t want to.)

I always get a kick when an out-of-towner, instead of asking for directions, asks me if I’m from New York, and then turns around and tries his luck with someone else before I’ve even had a chance to voice the but following my no. (Easier to find a real Apache in Vermont than a native New Yorker in Midtown, so with such brilliant questioning, the poor lost soul will be spending all afternoon chasing after his dopey directions.)

While many cases of linguistic absurdity seem fairly open-and-shut, it has been my experience that one (meaning I) can get into an awful lot of trouble either by (a) taking what people say too literally and ending up labeled a nitpicky, arrogant smartass, or (b) not taking it literally enough, thus getting accused of sloppy listening and/or of being too dense to retain and follow instructions exactly as they had been presented. In fact, I find that trying to decide whether I’m expected to take literally or to interpret consumes quite a lot of energy when dealing with people in general.

I highly recommend I Know You Are Lying by Mark McClish. It’s sort of the nitpicker’s Bible with a capital B.

He tackles similarly bizarre tropes, such as: “If you could pass the guacamole, that would be awesome.” You hear this at tables all around America every day, and yet it is absurd.

His answer: Deniability. A lot of our communications are really meant to preserve that.