> Tell your employees to stop creating fake profiles on OkCupid and spamming our users.
Seems to be what the poster really means.
>Please tell your employees to stop creating fake profiles on OkCupid and spamming our users.
That means the poster is begging the person stop? Does that really make sense? It sounds like someone is directly telling someone something, but is adding "Please" to get themselves off the hook for being seen as directly telling someone something.
As a native English speaker, I cannot remember anyone, except maybe an old person at dinner saying "Please pass the salt", say the world "Please" at the start of a phrase where it wasn't an aggressively postured order. Like this obviously was.
Serious question: Could you tell me what I'm missing with that?
"Please" is not a pleading word, it's a polite word. If you're going to give life advice, make sure it's right.
It would be more accurate to say that I don't have to, and that I sometimes don't. I'd be more likely to say "Can you pass me the salt?" or "pass the salt, will you?", which strikes me as a middle ground between "Please can you pass me the salt" and "Pass me the salt."
I sometimes find the English language to be quirky or frustrating, and I have some sympathy with efforts to change it for the better. I think in this instance you are tilting at windmills, and not offering sensible or sincere "life advice".
So in fact it doesn't make sense in some circumstances (though those circumstances are narrower and fewer than fubu seems to think).
For instance, "please" is clearly out of place in "please put the gun down on the pavement, or I will shoot!".
The civility-conveying meaning of the word is out of place in abrasive speech; for instance it is out of place in "please get off the f___ing road!" In abrasive language, if "please" appears, its presence is ironic. For instance, in a sentence like "please don't start with that bullshit again!", "please" doesn't have any connection to being civil; it doesn't function that way. Other such politeness words are also ironic in abrasive speech. "Kindly keep your mutt off my lawn!"
(There is even the usage of the word "please" by itself, or nearly so: "Oh, please!" or its variant "Puh-lease!" which expresses disagreement or disapproval.)
It conveys friendliness, the concept of "we're all friends here and we don't want anyone to get hurt, so let us sort this out without a mess"[0]. On the other hand one could argue that abrasive speech is very effective at bypasing various psychological bareers and delivering message straight to the target - after all, that's the reason for so much shouting and insults in the military. So there's a trade-off.
[0] - I guess I might have been watching too much Star Trek in my childhood, which gave me a deeply ingraned attitude that we can all see the bigger picture if we try hard enough.
It's not civil to say "Please stop spamming." That's like saying "Please stop beating your wife." It contains an accusation, which is never a civil thing to say. There is no civil way to bring up how your conversational partner is beating their wife or spamming OkCupid.
Adding a "Please" is pretending to be civil.
There are just some conversations that cannot be had "civilly". If you think this is stupid ....I can't really help you. Try to go have a civil conversation about someone's weight gain with them.
I think here lies our disagreement. I do believe that you can talk about anything in a civil manner. Being polite is completely orthogonal to the topic discussed. In this case, "please stop spamming" is just a more polite way of saying "stop spamming", period. The difference is in tone, not context, and this is how the word "please" is supposed to be used. Also, what goodside said was not "please stop spamming", but "please tell your employees to stop creating fake profiles (...) and spamming our users". Which is a request, not an order.
Accusations have nothing to do with civility. Telling me "please stop beating your wife" when I'm beating my wife is valid, just like saying "please stop spamming" is valid here because they're spamming. If you believe goodside is dishonest about Dating Ring's employees spamming OKCupid, address that.
*No scientific evidence behind this statement, but this is the internet, so it's true.
You are such a martyr! Your parents must be proud.