This from the London Evening Standard may offer guidance to all Mudcatters !
Have you asked the rudest question?

by Luke Leitch If there is a communication that corrupts good manners most, it must be the ill-advised question. Now a respected American arbiter of etiquette has declared that the rudest question of all is "Why aren't you married?" This incautious enquiry tops a list of 10 conversational calamities deemed the worst by the Emily Post Institute, which has been America's self-declared "civility barometer" since 1946.

Second in the institute's top 10 list of excruciating social gambits is the uncompromising "Why don't you have any children?" - another question likely to provoke those asked it to choke on their canapés.

Diplomats in the US State Department are among those to be given the list of unmentionables, revealed last night as part of a seminar on protocol.

Other catastrophic chat-up lines in the list include: "Are you tired? You look it?", "How much did that cost?", "You're dead wrong", "How old are you?", "Ah, c'mon. You can tell me", "I can see I'll have to simplify this for you", and - somewhat oddly - "As the President was telling me the other day".

Another less specific faux pas listed by the Emily Post Institute is to correct someone's punctuation.

The opportunities for questionable questions, then, are seemingly endless.

So perhaps it is best to avoid the interrogative entirely, mindful of Samuel Johnson's adage that "questioning is not the mode of conversation among gentlemen".

After all, the trouble with asking a rude question is that you might just get an answer. (c)Evening Standard

RtS