Status inqueries

[gmo]

I've noticed several people posting in the results section saying they inquired into their application status. How exactly did you go about doing that? Seems a bit tactless to just say "Hi, did you accept me yet?" I'm sort of hesitant to ask about my application status because I don't really want them to think "wow that person is a jerk, they were on the border and now they got pushed into the rejection pile" or something like that.

Also, I've noticed people have gotten acceptances to some of the schools I applied to. The implication of this is that they've sent out at least one "batch" of acceptances. If they have already sent out some acceptances, should I give up hope of hearing from those schools? For example, I see some people got accepted to UT-Austin already for physics. Should I give up hope of receiving anything from them? I know that in previous years (based upon the data on this site which is not a great sample size) they sent out more acceptances after the first wave. But it appears that the first wave was mostly Americans and the next wave was mostly international students. Seeing as it is that I'm an American, I'm thinking it's not very likely that I'll be accepted at this point.