“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…”.
Comment
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!! 😆
No comments:
Post a Comment