Linguistic rant time

English has been vexing me recently.

Which is not to say that I've fallen out of love with the language. Despite spending most of my time thinking, reading, and (more rarely) writing in Java than English these days, I'm still wildly and embarrassingly enthusiastic over words, syntax, and grammar. The Inky Fool and Six Degrees Of Sir Thomas remain two of the few non-webcomic subscriptions in my Google Reader.

Nevertheless, it's fallen sadly short of the mark recently. Prompted by a coworker musing on the distinction between the "Q" and the "LGB" in "LGBTQ" (and, yes, it was expressed in terms of Venn diagrams), I have recently been doing some asking around among more knowledgable people in order to broaden my knowledge. It was therein that English let me down.

I'm not, by the way, talking about the sad lack of commonplace non-gender-specific pronouns - though, as all educated dinosaurs know, this is a major problem:

Rather, I was disappointed by the lack of succinct ways to question or inquire, without appearing confrontational or challenging.

Lord knows that I, as a cis white straight male, am about as privileged as they come. Having spent some (rather depressing) time reading SRS, I'm aware of some of the ignorance, prejudice, and hostility that non-privileged individuals experience on a distressingly frequent basis. I'm pretty keen not to come across as contributing to that, and whenever I have asked questions I've done my best to present myself as knowingly ignorant but keen to learn.

But I've found it nearly impossible to express "what you have written suggests , which is contrary to what I understand/believe. Why do you think ?", without implying that is wrong or incorrect, except by smothering my question in a heavy mass of disclaimers and explanations.

This doesn't, of course, apply only to LGBTQ-related questions, or Social Justice matters in general. Think about these sentences; "Why don't you think unborn babies have a right to live?". "Don't you think the government has your best interests at heart?"."What makes you believe people have a right to bear arms?". All of them, to me, come across as being in opposition to the questionee, and it's pretty hard to dispel that impression without some serious verbal scaffolding.

Even so simple a phrase as "Why do you believe ?", to my ears, sounds like "You shouldn't believe ".

"You seem to think " => "Surely you couldn't be foolish enough to think !?".

"What's your justification for " => "I fundamentally doubt to be true, and anyone who believes it is a jackanape, a nincompoop, and a dullard"

Perhaps I'm being too sensitive to causing offence (I've certainly had that accusation leveled at me more than once!) - perhaps I've had my perception warped by too much time in an atmosphere of argument and combative discussion. It just seems to me that it's really, *really* difficult to ask a simple information-seeking question without implicitly undermining the questionee's views.

There's a time and a place for challenging people's views - and those conditions include being secure in your own knowledge and arguments, and (where appropriate) having established that the other party is similarly keen to debate. Sadly, many English phrases have been co-opted by debaters to mean more than they say.

On an unrelated and much more low-brow note, Season 4 of Community started today, but (due to the trivia–competition–and-viewing-party being sold out long before I found out about it) I still haven't seen the episode. I am not in any way frustrated or annoyed by this.