When a stranger approaches me with a generic salutation without a specific request -- e.g., "Hi!", how should I politely inquire about their purpose or matter/ topic of addressing me ?
Directly it would be "what do you want from me?", but how to say the same politely? In my native language it is something like "How can I serve you?", but this sounds to me excessively submissive -- in fact I am not their servant; maybe "In what way can I help you?" ?; but this sounds to me too specific, as offering some service, i.e., as asking for being assigned a specific task, so that a natural expected answer to such a question understood too literally could be "two mugs of beer, please" (once in such a situation I got an answer "send me money" -- I guess it was a joke ridiculing the literal meaning of my question ) ; instead, I want to make it clear that my reply is just a generic polite formula with no literal meaning, i.e., I want to be nice to them, but not to offer my service really.
For example, if somebody messages me with a "Hi :)", an answer that I might expect to such a polite question that I am looking for, could be "professor, I am interested in studying PhD in your Lab under your guidance" or "I want to publish a paper in your journal", if this is the case i.e., if this was the motivation (subject / topic) of their contacting me. -- not "send me money" or "two cups of coffee, please".
do we know each other?
, which I understood as equivalent towhat do you want from me?
, but I don't think this is the answer to my question: this was not too polite, and was not an explicit inquire about my purposes.Like this
for quotes. It messes up the formatting, by changing the font and putting the text in grey background. the backticks are used for computer code, and should never be used here. Just use ordinary quote marks " Also split up text into paragraphs by leaving a blank line between paragraphs.