The situation:
On my whatsapp group, we are planning a trip for the long weekend one month ahead. We need to decide and finalize who's in asap. 3/5 people confirm. 2 have yet to reply. In a personal IM to one of those 2, I want to ask him if he can confirm today. So I should be asking -
"Hey, can you confirm by today?"
The problem here is that "Can you confirm by today" is considered as a request nowadays rather than its literal meaning of whether or not he can confirm by today. My intention is not to pressurize him into taking the decision today itself but just to literally gauge if he can confirm today.
Why has the meaning of this statement changed?
One reason may be because, the word "can" has come to be used to make requests even more politely than they already when using the word "please".
eg: Please confirm by today. (1) - this is a request which is already polite due to the presence of "please".
To make it more polite, people phrase (1) as:
Can you please confirm by today? (2)
In the current times, (2) is regarded as the most polite version of (1) portraying soft skills. Perhaps a few decades ago, (1) could have been regarded as the most polite version. Then as its popularity grew and it became street-common, it started losing its politeness. Hence there arose a need for a different phrasing to restore the same level of politeness leading to the use of phrase (2) now.
In this process, however, the original meaning of (2) (i.e. the words "Can you") has been lost irreplacably because there is no other phrase / word to convey the literal meaning alone. Ofcourse, you could use extra sentences to clarify what you mean exactly but is that really a good solution?
---
