If a stranger is blocking your view in a movie theater, how do you respond? For many folks, the polite response might be, “Would you please move out of the way?” That’s because we use the word please to make requests sound polite, but there are times when a simple please just doesn’t sound gracious enough. For some people, that sentence might even sound a little aggressive. What’s going with our language? Fortunately for us, University of Michigan English Professor Anne Curzan is here to help us