Please translate this Japanese phrase

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I don’t know for sure how it’s written, I’ve only heard it in conversation (in Japanese language TV shows on TV Japan, so there aren’t subtitles).

Also I don’t know how to do kana or kanji on my keyboard, so I will have to do it in romaji. This is why I can’t look it up on any online translation source, none of them seem to accept romaji input.

Moo shika shite

or it might be two words, like

mooshi kashite

or some other configuration. It must be a common phrase, I hear it a lot. From context, I’m guessing it’s something like “do you think that…” or “you don’t suppose that…”

Am I close?

2

Moshi kashite?

Means “sort-of” or “perhaps” or “kind-of” in a really rough sense, or sort of “uh-huh, go on, tell me more” in a sort of skeptical way.

Like a very polite (diffident?) way to disagree without really disagreeing, or to distance yourself from what the other person said without saying they’re wrong. That sort of thing.

3

Thank you very much.

Now I see that I should have looked up the whole expression in my dictionary, it has “moshikashitara” as “perhaps, maybe, possibly, it is to be feared that.”