Polerius:
No, it was not intentional.
The examples you gave are part of the pattern. Someone might say:store ? And there was this guy ? And he asked me to give him some money ? I mean WTF?”
Initially, people only spoke like that, but I see it more often now in writing.
A related form of this pattern is when an answer is given, with a question mark at the end:Question : “Why do old men wear their baseball caps that way?”
The answer could be rephrased as
“They forget how to adjust the size?” seems to indicate that the speaker is more sure that that could be a possible answer, than if he were to ask “Could the reason be that they forget how to adjust the size?”
Another thing that’s wierd is that my cousins in NJ/PA ask their questions in a declarative tone. Like Are you going to the zoo (UP) today(dn).
The upward inflection at the end of a declarative sentence indicating insecurity was the subject of a segment on NPR circa 1992 in which it was identified as intonational rise .
Apparently, no one else heard the piece… since I’ve used the phrase a number of times over the years and no one else has ever recognized what I was talking about!