The phrase "cruel question" is correct and usable in written English.
It is a common expression used to describe a question that is intended to cause emotional pain or discomfort. Example: During the press conference, the reporter asked a cruel question about the actor's recent divorce, leaving the audience and the actor visibly uncomfortable.
"Kind questions are designed to lull your quarry into a conversational mood," she writes, so that by the time the cruel questions arise the subject "will find it hard to duck and may blurt out a quotable nugget".
I visited on two consecutive days, and each day Annis, Flew's wife of 55 years, served me a glass of water and left me in the sitting room to ask her husband a series of tough, indeed rather cruel, questions.
"Can't we go to McDonalds?" was the cruelest question you could ask them, and the frequency with which we put it could fairly be characterized as a violation of their Eighth Amendment rights.
Some think that it would be cruel to question what a seriously ill person says she wants.
The mayor called the commission a cruel hoax, questioned the need for "another blue ribbon panel" and said elected leaders in Albany should just resolve the inequities in school financing in the next budget.
Open borders, closed borders; sovereignty versus globalization; even that cruelest of questions, the "valuable" immigrant versus the immigrant who is likely to be a burden: all of these topics are now on the table.
The court received no answer to this cruel and silly question, but one could easily have found an answer had he permitted his imagination to dwell for a few minutes on the fate of those Dutch Jews who in 1941, in the old Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, dared to attack a German security police detachment.
I feel cruel even asking the question.
It was a question of cruel and unusual punishment.
"The last one I could bear to read was a diatribe against old people who traveled on buses: Why did they never have their money ready?... Why did they insist on standing up 10 minutes before their stop, thus obliging them to fall over frequently in an alarming and undignified fashion?" Katie, no bus rider she, clearly believes that these questions are cruel and stupid.
