If I meet someone with a not-so-hot grasp of English or American customs, I cut them a ton of slack when it comes to finding anything they do offensive. Mispronunciations or misunderstandings about customs are much more likely to amuse me than to offend me. I can’t even imagine a circumstance where someone without a solid grasp of English could say something that would offend me. I would assume they didn’t know what they were saying.
But in some movies and books, there’s this idea that it’s really easy to put one word out of place and offend someone from another culture–offend them so badly that they will want to kill you/shun you/not do business with you, etc.
Currently there’s a Continental Airlines commercial with a guy stumbling around various countries, obviously consulting a phrasebook, who ends up saying something to a woman who stands up and slaps him. The commercial is actually rather funny, since the guy seems so hapless.
But where does this idea come from? Is there any truth to it?
Am I just relatively hard to offend?
Or do I live in a culture that’s unusually hard to offend while people from other cultures are liable to be offended by something a dude with a phrasebook might manage to mispronounce?
Or (my initial guess) do Americans, for whatever reason, simply have this idea that all these people in “exotic” cultures are oh-so-easy to offend with innocent misunderstandings?
From what I’ve seen most scenarios involving the offended person are due to an insulting comment. Kind of like if someone walked up to and said “Hey, baby! Nice tits.” I think you might not slap them, but you would at least be a little offended I think.
On a related note, where do meddling officials (English local councils, I’m looking at YOU!) get the idea that people from other cultures and religions would be “offended” by locals celebrating local festivals? See, for instance, the almost pathological fear of Christmas celebrations exhibited by councillors in cities with large non-Christian immigrant populations.
If I lived in, say, Egypt, I wouldn’t be “offended” by the locals celebrating Eid. I’d kind of expect it, and hope that I would be included. So why should Muslims or Hindus be “offended” by British people celebrating Christian festivals?
The answer, of course, is that they are not remotely offended, but jobsworths with degrees in Social Studies think that they might be, and want to look busy. Result? Ill-feeling all round.
Aint it the truth. Same thing here in Canada. Businesses don’t have Christmas parties anymore: we have “holiday parties.” I would not be offended in the least if a muslim wished me a happy Ramadan, or if a jew wished me a happy Hanukkah. In fact I would be pleased to be included in their ceremony.
I think I heard something on the radio about government offices not being allowed to celebrate Canada Day this year because it would be insensitive to non-Canadians. I’ll do some research and start a separate thread if that’s the case.
I think it’s a bit of an old fashioned joke from old American movies where some guy gets out of his league trying to be diplomatic with a foreigner and puts his foot in his mouth and creates comedic mayhem. I think those stories originally made sense back at a time when white Americans were very sheltered from any other cultures and had more xenophobia and ignorance about unfamiliar cultures. The audience liked to imagine everyone else was very mysterious and potentially volatile because they didn’t really know much about anyone aside from having wars with them. Now it’s kind of like a cultural reference. Now it makes sense as a reference back to all those movies that we are all familiar with. So it doesn’t refer to anything that’s true now.
There you have it. Films and books need a plot. If an American makes a mistake and the foreigners giggle it off, you don’t have a moviescene, you just have a pleasant holiday memory.
To have an exciting movie scene, you gotta have, at the very least, an enraged heavily mustachio’d Spanish senor with honor-revenge on his mind.
It’s the same with documentaries about foreigners opinions on Americans. A full hour of Europeans saying: “Americans? Dunno. Okay I guess.” doesn’t make for interesting TV. So it doesn’t get filmed, even though it is probably an accurate description of the general opinion. A journalist who wants to score is better off filming some Arab hotheads (or government-sponsored Arab officials posing as Arab hotheads) busy burning American flags.
However, do draw a distinction from the annual news story about an Oxfam shop which has been told by head office to take down its nativity scene. This always is because of some old biddy at that branch being oblivious to Oxfam having a long-standing policy of being an unambiguously non-religious organisation, and of avoiding anything which they regard as a promotion of any single religion. Kind of sensible to have such a rigorous policy, when you think of the environments Oxfam finds itself operating in some parts of the world. (And it’s why their ‘Christmas’ cards always show snowmen or doves or whatever, with no specific Christian imagery.)
It happens to me regularly. In fairness, it also happens the other way round, to wit, somebody says something to me which I understand incorrectly. What happens even more often is that somebody says something which is not in Holland offensive but which in American would be. Or the reverse.
It never (or at least not yet) ends in any kind of killing or shunning. But it has frequently ended in long explanations sometimes days or weeks after the fact.
I expect it happens more often to immigrants than to visitors. It takes longer to work out the unspoken assumptions embedded in a culture than you might think. Longer than I thought anyway.
ETA: I am an American who immigrated to Holland three years ago. I speak only Dutch except to my own children.
I’m with you,jsgoddess, I tend to cut foreigners a lot of slack.
I saw a Somali woman at a doctor’s office snap her fingers at the nurse to get her attention. That did not go over very well with the nurse and the woman would up waiting a long time for her appointment. I can only suppose that snapping one’s fingers is not rude in her culture and I think she had no idea it wasn’t done here in the US.
In that ridiculous kind of situation, I think someone went to great lengths to get away with something like that. However, I am quite patient with others for whom English is a 2nd language. In fact, it takes a lot to offend me. You would really have to go out of your way to offend me.
I think by not responding to the finger-snapping, the woman will gradually learn that it’s unacceptable behavior in the US.
When I worked in a computer lab during grad school, some Indian students would often ask for help in the imperative mood - “You will help me set the page margins on my thesis!” instead of the precative “Can you help me set the page margins on my thesis?” I helped them, but often offered a gentle reminder that using the imperative mood for requests in American English is generally considered rude.
Question: does sensitivity training or the concept of “not offending or being offended by the foreigners” exist in non-Anglo cultures? I’m under the impression that Americans and Brits have to take extraordinary measures to be sensitive to the cultural dos and taboos of others, but for those others anything goes when the tables are turned.
Are Japanese businesspeople told that Americans don’t mean to offend by not handling an offered business card like a delicate flower? Do Arab businesspeople understand it’s not a grave insult if a European or American accidentally reveals the soles of their shoes? Are the French ever told that it’s rude to bother American tourists or businesspeople with unsolicited condemnations of the Bush administration or some US foreign policy issue? Are the Spanish told Americans have a large circle of “personal space,” and might not be comfortable at an extremely close distance?
Sure. Back when I was teaching English, that was frequently a large part of the job. Many times I’d get adult students who were about to be transferred to an overseas office, so their company signed them up for a crash course in English. Since the student and I both realized that three hours a day of grammar drills wasn’t going to do jack, we’d spend a lot of the time on social aspects. That included the taboos to avoid, J-taboos that were everyday behavior elsewhere, and general tips for how to get along smoothly.
Even in the regular language classes, I’d spend time on dos don’ts, especially if I noticed the students saying things that could cause misunderstandings (it never ceases to amaze me how an innocent phrase can inadvertantly turn impolite with a simple change of phrasing or grammar).
Jokes about overseas faux-pas are pretty common here, too. I’ve heard the story about the Japanese businessman in America getting punched out by a black bartender because he comments that his drink is bitter (nigai), at least a half-dozen times.
Reminds me of a particular issue which caused problems with Somali teenagers and the Metropolitan Police (most of the Somali population in Britain being in London). The ‘come here’ gesture, with a repeated curling of an upturned index finger. Slightly condescending in Britain, perfect for a policeman intending to give a mischeivous kid a gentle warning. Highly offensive in Somalia.
I can think of at least one case like this. When I was at orientation camp to be an exchange student in Spain, one of the other American exchange students (who was actually Puerto Rican, so spoke more Spanish than the rest of us) made some mistake or misbehaved in some minor way. One of the instructors called him on it. His response, in Spanish, because we were supposed to be using our Spanish, was “Don’t crucify me.” To my midwestern US ears, this was a little colorful but totally in the realm of something OK to say. Well, it turns out the instructor was Jewish. I had no idea, and I don’t think the other student did, either. Spain is 90+% Catholic, so I definitely wasn’t on the lookout for religious diversity. Anyway, the instructor really and truly took offense at this and chewed out the student. While the student may have been knowingly rude in a bad attitude sense, I am certain he had no idea he’d crossed the line into ethnic slurs territory. I guess maybe this might have been just as rude in English from a student to a teacher he didn’t know was Jewish. I’m not sure.
I once got genuinely chewed out for using a Spanish cuss word (I swear I heard people using it all the time!) in what was apparently NOT an OK context (chatting with my host mom while leaving the hairdressers).
Misunderstanding the context for swear words is easy to do, I think. I once advised a non-US English speaker to take a G-- d— out of a presentation he was giving here in the US South. I don’t think he realized that in the Bible Belt there are a lot of people who take G–d— much more seriously than just d—.
In summary, I do think genuine offense happens. However, I think it sneaks up on you once you are becoming comfortable in the culture, not while you are still at the panicked phrasebook stage.
