"fatal question" is a grammatically correct and commonly used phrase in written English.
It refers to a question that has serious or disastrous consequences for the person being asked. It can be used in various contexts, such as a court case, a political debate, or a personal conversation. Example: The lawyer asked the witness a fatal question that caused the entire case to crumble.
Let us first review the setting of the fatal question in the trial.
For residents of Stuyvesant Town, beleaguered citadel of rent-stabilized, middle-class living, it could have been a fatal question.
Smith's work stands exposed in its failure to resolve a fatal question that arises when sculpture flirts with picture-ness: pictures of what?
When she at last poses the fatal question, Lohengrin says the pernickety rules governing the Knights of the Grail have been broken and he has to go home, and poor Elsa drops dead.
Ortrud immediately spots the chink in his gleaming armour and plants a seed of doubt in Elsa, which leads her on the couple's wedding (k)night to ask the fateful (indeed fatal) question.
Our string faculty's fatal question -- "Did you mean to do that?" -- was really so simple.
In 1929, the conventional notion that coccidioidal infections were rare and consistently fatal was questioned after Harold Chope, a medical student, accidentally inhaled Coccidioides spores from a culture plate in the Stanford University laboratory of Ernest Dickson.
The fatal "what if?" question.
Such a failure to object is often but not always fatal, and the question for the justices involved, as Justice Anthony M. Kennedy put it, "the metaphysics of the plain error rule".
When a show clocking in at less than an hour can find six or eight minutes to devote to a scene-by-scene retelling of "Fatal Attraction," any questions about narrative urgency can safely be put to rest.
He tries persuasion on a young Hamas soldier, debates a fierce sheik with "a frown like a thousand fatal fatwas" on the question of moral tolerance, and confronts his own son for becoming an "adherent of a crazy, hard-line version of our religion".
