smoke/d

Would you mind if I smoked a cigarette? This is more polite than "Will you mind..." Am I correct?

"Do you smoke after making love?"
"I don't know - I've never looked!"

Would you mind if I smoke/smoked a cigarette?

Should I use 'smoke'? If both words can be used, is there a difference in the meaning of the sentences?

Many thanks.

(Note: not "Can I smoke?"). When I was a small child at school in the 1950s, if you asked the teacher, "Can I go to the toilet, Miss?", the reply was "You can, but you may not".

contrex wrote:

(Note: not "Can I smoke?"). When I was a small child at school in the 1950s, if you asked the teacher, "Can I go to the toilet, Miss?", the reply was "You can, but you may not".

Contrex,

This was a complete fiction in the 50s just as much as it is a complete fiction today. You, as a child, had a much better grasp of English than your teacher.

I don't agree either. This is not a simple matter of grammar. There is no such thing as one single "English". I was brought up in Sarf London. (Tulse Hill) The local kids spoke like Cockneys. Making a distinction between "I can" - "I am able to" and "I may" - "I have permission to" is a class indicator in BrE speech. In those days teachers felt that it was part of their job to impose "posh" speech patterns on their little charges.

Hi JTT

What Contrex said is also stated in an English usage book. The writer states that if a student asks, "Can I go to the toilet?" the teacher can say, "You can go, but I won't let you go."

The writer is in favour of "May ... "

Hope this will prove that what Contrex said is also supported by an English authority.

Regards

Obviously, you need to build in some kind of rules, but what kind? Prescriptive rules? Imagine trying to build a talking machine by designing it to obey rules like "Don't split infinitives" or "Never begin a sentence with [because]." It would just sit there. In fact, we already have machines that don't split infinitives; they're called screwdrivers, bathtubs, cappuccino- makers, and so on.

Prescriptive rules are useless without the much more fundamental rules that create the sentences to begin with. These rules are never mentioned in style manuals or school grammars because the authors correctly assume that anyone capable of reading the manuals must already have the rules. No one, not even a valley girl, has to be told not to say [Apples the eat boy] or [Who did you meet John and?] or the vast, vast majority of the trillions of mathematically possible combinations of words.

So when a scientist considers all the high-tech mental machinery needed to arrange words into ordinary sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential little decorations. The very fact that they have to be drilled shows that they are alien to the natural workings of the language system. One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.

http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1994_01_24_thenewrepublic.html

The legislators of "correct English," in fact, are an informal network of copy-editors, dictionary usage panelists, style manual writers, English teachers, essayists, and pundits. Their authority, they claim, comes from their dedication to implementing standards that have served the language well in the past, especially in the prose of its finest writers, and that maximize its clarity, logic, consistency, elegance, precision, stability, and expressive range. William Safire, who writes the weekly column "On Language" for the [New York Times Magazine], calls himself a "language maven," from the Yiddish word meaning expert, and this gives us a convenient label for the entire group.



To whom I say: Maven, shmaven! [Kibbitzers] and [nudniks] is more like it. For here are the remarkable facts. Most of the prescriptive rules of the language mavens make no sense on any level. They are bits of folklore that originated for screwball reasons several hundred years ago and have perpetuated themselves ever since. For as long as they have existed, speakers have flouted them, spawning identical plaints about the imminent decline of the language century after century. All the best writers in English have been among the flagrant flouters.

The rules conform neither to logic nor tradition, and if they were ever followed they would force writers into fuzzy, clumsy, wordy, ambiguous, incomprehensible prose, in which certain thoughts are not expressible at all. Indeed, most of the "ignorant errors" these rules are supposed to correct display an elegant logic and an acute sensitivity to the grammatical texture of the language, to which the mavens are oblivious.

http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1994_01_24_thenewrepublic.html