Democrats have the tougher task, and should not stick to inoffensive questions.
Luz and my mother went through the protocols of a civilized visit: inoffensive questions, anodyne chitchat, the usual phrases and gestures intended to fill up space rather than convey meaning.
This was a crowd that knew the ingredients in a mignonette and tended to ask informed, or at least inoffensive, questions, such as, "What kind of oysters are those?" (BeauSoleil, East Coast, from Brunswick, "about as far north as you can go," according to Tsuzuki).
A pre-pilot study is recommended to show that questions are culturally inoffensive and that the length of the questionnaire is acceptable.
The purpose was to establish that questions were acceptable and inoffensive.
To establish that the questions would be comprehensible, acceptable and inoffensive to respondents, and the questionnaire usable, we conducted a pre-pilot study in Karachi.
At the trial, held in mid-June, character witnesses testified that Dixon was "a harmless, inoffensive man, but destitute of business capacity" and "in reply to the question whether Dixon was non compos mentis, I consider him as being on the frontier line sometimes on one side, and sometimes on the other, just as the breeze of fortune happens to blow".
"So I suppose the question is: if an offensive word is used in what's meant to be an inoffensive way, does it make it any less hurtful?
As a result Lothar Kurzawa's painstakingly inoffensive screenplay tiptoes around sexual differences as though genitals were land mines, even though the athlete in question, here called Marie Ketteler (sensitively played by Sebastian Urzendowsky), has hands like ham hocks and an Adam's apple like a small fist.
