Lynne Truss on the proper response to a formal greeting Is this a dagger which I see before me? Yes/No/Oh blimey, now it's gone! Does your chewing gum lose its flavour on the bed post over night? Yes, inevitably; it's tragic. (Yes! And look! It's the penguin with a rubber glove on its head!) So those are proper yes/no questions. "How are you?" belongs, surely, with the more "open" type of question, such as: Where will the baby's dimple be? No one knows; it might not even have one. When did you last see your father? I'd rather not say until I've seen my lawyer. Where have all the flowers gone? Long time passing? What'll I do/when you/are far away/and I am blue/what'll I do? Can't bear to think about it, but getting a puppy would be a jolly good first step. Of course, there is no harm in inserting this affirmative "yes," even though it makes no sense grammatically. What I've decided is that it's just a short way of saying, "Thank you for asking," while at the same time signalling cheerfully that grammar is all but dead, so basically, chum, get used to it. But it also shows - interestingly - how far we've come in terms of formal greetings rituals. After all, in the old days, "How do you do?" wasn't treated as a question requiring any answer at all. If someone said, "How do you do?," you were supposed to reply, neutrally, "How do you do?" Then you would turn to a third person and say, "How do you do?" and he/she would say, "How do you do?" back. At no point in any of these strictly codified transactions did anyone mention that their chilblains were back, or that they'd actually tried to commit suicide last week but the shilling in the meter had run out halfway through. Many older people are still quite shocked to receive detailed health bulletins in response to their formal how-do-you-do greetings. They are also often incandescent at the use of "good" to mean "well," of course; but the slow death of the adverb is a weightier matter, reserved for another day. Thinking about all this, I have to admit that I now don't so much ask how people are; increasingly, I tell them how they are, before they get the chance to account for themselves in their own words. You look so well! I say. "So do you!" they say. But I feel like crap! "Well, it suits you!" they reply. That's a beautiful scarf! And so on. So maybe the whole questioning ritual may soon be at an end, to be replaced by exclamatory compliments, and the issue of whether question and answer agree won't any longer arise. In the meantime, however, I suggest we try out new greetings questions, just for the hell of it - "Hey, you, have you seen this chicken?" Hello, will you marry me? "Huh, is grammar dead or what?" - in the knowledge that "Yeah, I'm fine, I'm good," will be the automatic response, whatever it is that you ask.