Can I help?

Matt: As I wandered through a mall today, hence forth known as 'the Mall', I passed a member of the Mall staff, a smily fellow, bedecked with black, Mall branded atire which bore the slogan "Can I help you?" emblazoned across it in sunburst yellow. Now I'm sure the wearer wasn't really concerned about his own ability to actually provide help, so it must be others that are unsure of his capacity. But why these 'others', be them Mall management, marketers, branding gurus or designers, thought that I might be able to answer this question baffles me. Perhaps the question wasn't directed at me personally, perhaps there was someone in the Mall, at the same time as me, that is better qualified to answer this almost rhetorical banana coloured query.

Living in the UAE we are accustom to living in a cultural and ethnic mixing pot, where, to be fair to most, English may not be the majority's first language. Are we then remiss to accept grammatical faux pas such as the above example without even a stopping to consider it?

Don't get me wrong, I'm no spelling or grammar Nazi, I make mistakes, A LOT! I'm just curious as to whether we should pass comment, correct or ignore? Or has the situation gotten so bad that most of us native English speakers don't even notice some of these errors anymore, have we come to accept and even use them ourselves?

I think the Can/May error is extremely common in everyday speech now, what other errors can you find that are overlooked in the English language these days? Or even simple errors or bad English, I'm not asking you to regurgitate the writings of Lynne Truss here, I'm just interested to find some classic advertising/marketing cock-ups.

Don't even get me started on text messaging and chat abbreviations and I wonder how many of you will just pick me up on my errors? Save yourself the time - you'll be hours finding them all :)

As for the question as it should, correctly, be written "May I help you?", shouldn't that come with about 16 pages of legal terms defining what The Mall considers that it's staff should and should not, can and cannot, may and may not actually help with? What's to stop me walking up to the poor, unsuspecting fellow and asking him to help me ram-raid the jewelers on the ground level in section C? Do you think my branded mall helper is armed with the correct response to such a request?

Hmmmm....