Agreed. An old Italian housemate sought my advice, after embarassing himself while in a bank, having bureaucratic trouble. Without a hushed voice (and he was a big man) he’d said ‘why can’t you fucking do xyz’. And from his description, it was a classic everyone-go-silent moment.
The thing is, he couldn’t understand how we could use that language all day long in the flat, and in the pub, and so on, yet that particular word was taboo in some situations. I didn’t have much of an explanation for him.
Where I work, it is standard policy to greet and adress customers. A mid eastern man and woman came in (obviously new to the country)
I said hello to the woman, and then to the man. "He looked at me as if I was a piece of crap. I asked him if there was anything I could do for him. He told me “It is impolite to adress the woman before the man… it places her in the awkward position of having to speak to an unknown man with out her husband’s permision…”.
I apologized, but thought “well, buddy… get used to it… we talk to people here…(Canada)…”
I think the reason the idea is so persistent might be confirmation bias. We’re much more likely to remember, or hear about, the time when someone said something innocent, or used an ordinary hand gesture and ended up locked in a cell for the night, or got slapped around the face, or had a bucket of water tipped over them, or the locals all fell about laughing and pointing, than we are to remember or hear about the time when someone said something innocent, or used an ordinary hand gesture and the locals were merely quietly bemused or just brushed it off.
I haven’t a clue if it’s apocryphal, but an example of this that springs to my mind is the story of some guys who got into serious difficulties in a small boat, but the authorities left them to drown because their emphatic gesturing was interpreted as locally meaning ‘stay away’.
Ho hum. Here we go again… Daily Mail readers of the world unite. :rolleyes:
Christmas is not “banned” by anyone, let alone Councils.
The stories that get circulated nearly always fall into two categories:
Urban Legends - or a misinterpretation of a story after it’s been passed through the filter of hysterical right-wing newspapers columnists. “Winterval” is a good example of this.
Isolated misunderstandings - occasionally, as with the Oxfam case, a particular individual (often low down in the organisational hierarchy) will make a mistake, either interpreting guidance wrongly or making an error of ommission. It rarely, if ever, represents “official” policy, and is usually corrected straight away.
But none of this seems to get through to the mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers who still insist that putting up an xmas tree will result in a visit from the Thought Police.
Excellent article on this phenomenon last xmas in the Grauniad:
One of my Venezuelan relatives committed the faux-pas of hissing (“PSSSSST!”) to get a waitress’s attention in a restaurant in Oxford. It’s fairly normal in some Latin American countries, but a complete no-no in the UK.