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Monday, June 1, 2020

'perhaps you'd like to', 'Bull' Seneviratne



“Perhaps you’d like to”
Prof Kithsiri Nissanka (Bull) Seneviratne, medical teacher, par excellence, and eminent physiologist, acted as a mentor to me, in medical school, and as a young doctor, until I left for postgraduate studies in the UK, in 1977.
He was instrumental in promoting me to go to Oxford, and lent me a book of about the citadel, before I left. He also sat me down, to give me an introduction, about life, idioms, and mannerisms of the UK. One of his homilies, was about deciphering English manners of speech.
He told me about responding to the invitation “perhaps you’d like to…”. Now a Sri Lankan, addressed like that, “no I would rather not do that”. KN S informed me, that this invitation, did not give you a choice, but was an 'order' that you had to obey.
On my first day at the Nuffield Department of medicine, my supervisor, Ian MacLennan, handed me a pile of histological slides of human spleens, and said, we knew a lot about the spleen, but we don’t know much about “the marginal zone of the white pulp”. Perhaps you’d like to find out more. I knew enough about the English turn of phrase, not to turn down the opportunity.
Later that year, I got into a crowded bus, in Oxford, although there is plenty of room at the back of the aisle, the middle-aged English man wasn’t moving. So I smiled sweetly and said “perhaps you’d like to move down the aisle to the back”. The man was dumbstruck, and I thought he was going to have apoplexy, this young darkie, giving him an order.
43 years later, I hardly ever hear the phrase “perhaps you’d like to…”.

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Rabin Mendis That is common here too in Canada but we phrase it "would you like to". And when it comes from your boss you act as though some one just asked you " is the Pope Catholic'. Yes, with gusto!! 😆

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