What is a Request?

I find it difficult to express what, precisely, most people are getting at when they use the word “request”. I am tempted to say that a request is simply the making known of a desire, perhaps specifically making it known to one who could fulfill that desire. However, the sentence “I wanted to let you know I want X, but this isn’t me asking for it” seems to make a kind of sense to me.

There is a general, subtle, expectation of certain behaviors towards others within our social circles. How much is expected, and of who, is extraordinarily complicated, and far beyond the scope of this essay. Nevertheless, suffice it to say that your friends will get upset with you if you refuse to grant a certain baseline level of requests, within limits. Correspondingly, your friends will get upset with you if you ask of them too much, or too frequently. The closest analogy I can think of is a term like “social debt”. This is, admittedly, a poor analogy, and one that is likely tainted by my cultural inculcation in the cult of capitalism. Nevertheless, with the acknowledgement that it is a deeply imperfect turn of phrase, we’ll run with it.

So, it seems to me that, within the context of the English language, and I cannot speak for anything more than that, most usages of the term “request” seem to be indicating a kind of linguistic ritual whereby the speaker 1. makes known a desire to someone who, theoretically, can fulfill that desire, and 2. cashes in some amount of social debt, or takes upon themselves some degree of social debt.