whimperative
n.— «The whimperative and the impositive are polite ways of commanding or requesting through indirection. Sadock states: “Every language provides subtle and not-so-subtle means of encoding information about the intentions of the speaker and his assumptions about the speech situation in the sentences he uses”….At times, deliberate ambiguity of illocutionary force may be used defensively in making a provocative utterance because the speaker can claim he never meant the statement in the way it was conceived by the listener.» —“The Question Intonation in Assertions” by Marvin K.L. Ching American Speech Summer, 1982. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
How and why do words from one language find their way into another? Vietnamese, for instance, includes many words borrowed or adapted from French, a vestige of colonialism. For example, the Vietnamese word for “train station,” ga, comes...
A young caller from the Hudson Valley of New York wonders about his grandmother’s use of stemwinder to praise a speech she thought was excellent. In the early 1800s, people used pocket watches that had to be wound with a tiny key. Once someone...