The Guaranteed Unanswerable Question

"How's everybody doing," asks my fitness instructor as she looks out over her class of twenty-five sweating participants. I can't count the number of times I've heard that asked of a group and how many times the questioner looks disappointed because of the ensuing non-response.

It's the kind of question that is all too often asked of people in any type of group activity. "How's everybody with the room temperature?" How can anybody answer that question. I don't know how everybody feels! I can only respond for myself.

 Much more answerable would be "Should I bring out the fans?" and the answer could communicated easily in the form of an audible YES or NO from individual participants. The answer to "How are you doing?" could be answered with an audible OK or thumbs up (or thumbs down, too) from most people in the group.

A lot of questions are unanswerable: Is there life after death? Are human rights intrinsic? Will the United States survive to celebrate its 300th birthday? But one unanswerable question becomes answerable with a tiny word-choice change.