What is the difference between following two statements?
- How are you doing?
- How do you do?
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Please use the edit link to tell us more about these two sentences. What does your own research tell you about them? What do you think they mean? We need to know what you know before we can provide a useful answer!– P. E. Dant Reinstate MonicaCommented Jun 23, 2017 at 17:39
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Please add more information to your question! If you don't, it may be closed, and we would rather help you by providing an answer.– P. E. Dant Reinstate MonicaCommented Jun 23, 2017 at 18:19
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1 Answer
Both are stock, polite greetings. They both REALLY mean "hello", simply acknowledging the other person's presence. The stock response is "Fine, thank you, and you?"
It's very common (and thus boring) for people to point out that no one expects a real answer to the question. If you said to some one, "How are you doing?" and they proceeded to describe their health or social problems, it would just be strange. It would be even stranger if they actually described how they were doing their current task. Like, "How do you do?" "Oh, I do this by inserting the plugh into the foobar, wrapping the nanobucket around the widget, and then ..."
In short, neither sentence really "means" anything. They're just polite stock phrases.
