[General] Do do for a living

What are you doing?
He wants to know what you are doing. This is correct.




What do you do for a living?
He wants to know what you do do for a living. Is this correct too?


It looks strange! You can help me.

Yes. You can even shorten the second question to "what do you do?" in many contexts and be understood.

SoothingDave said:

Yes. You can even shorten the second question to "what do you do?" in many contexts and be understood.

Click to expand...

He wants to know what you do do for a living.
So the above is grammatically all right!

Tina3 said:

He wants to know what you do do for a living.
So the above is grammatically all right!

Click to expand...

My sentence is correct. Yours is not. You can't say "do do for a living."

He wants to know what you do for a living. So he asks, "what do you do?"

The first "do" is a helper verb. The second is the main verb. He could just as easily ask "what do you make?" or "what do you think?"

I want to know about your job or work.
What are you doing?
Is the above fine?

:up: But in her defence 'what you do do for a living' is possible in contexts that call for contrastive stress (rare though such a context may be ;-))

b

Tina3 said:

I want to know about your job or work.
What are you doing?
Is the above fine?

Click to expand...

No, that isn't what "what are you doing?" means. As you stated in your original post, it is asking about the activity you are doing right now. Not about your occupation.

To ask about someone's occupation, you can ask:

- What do you do for a living?
- What do you do for your job?
- What do you do for work? (Less common)
- What is your job?
- What is your occupation?
- What do you do?

Informally:

- How do you earn a crust?
- What do you do to pay the bills?

We do not ask (in this context):

What are you doing?

:up:

N: What do you do?
Me: I'm a semi-retired self-employed polymath.

N: What are you doing?
Me: Procrastinating ;-)

b

BobK said:

I'm a semi-retired self-employed polymath.

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I think I may steal that. Thank you.