[bbarn]

Working for London startups in the past, I've found they're much more polite, but much less honest and straightforward. There's a layer of britishness you have to get past sometimes to get to what people really want instead of directness.

[slgeorge]

As a Brit when I started doing deals in North America one of the things I picked up was that I had to be explicit about disagreement OR where a decision was not being made yet. In the UK during a negotiation a 'silence' is not equal to agreement or disagreement, it's a NO-OP. If I didn't do this then prospective customers/suppliers in the USA would believe that I'd agreed to their request when from my perspective I had merely noted that they'd asked for something. Has anyone else run into this?

The other one that's confusing is that "tabling" something means the complete opposite.

I would separate 'politeness' and 'indirectness' a bit. I generally agree about 'politeness', there are plenty social forms that Brits still follow. For example I found the language/manner of New York attorneys pretty 'aggressive' the first few times.

Indirectness, is definitely a thing - Brits speak to each other or signal disagreement in ways that's clear to another Brit, but maybe not others. The use of silence, but also some words that depending on tone can mean different things which I think is difficult for North American's to interpret.

[Quarrelsome]

best reasoning I've heard for this is that English is subtext heavy, like Japanese due to the history of the aristocracy. The populace were in thrall to their feudal lords and the aristocracy as serfs and servant classes for so long, that being indirect has been embedded into the language as a defense mechanism to not upset the pay masters. We get the subtext but people new to our culture might not.

I remember a technological mess being present at work and my team lead bringing out the classic:

> it's not ideal is it?

or the classic Jeeves and Wooster valet/aristocrat relationship with Jeeves giving it the:

> as you say sir

> very good sir

with both statements being flexible but often being delivered with the dripping subtext of "yeah that's complete bollocks".[0]

Obviously this doesn't apply to the real working classes but then those types are not the sort to gain a STEM education.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s03Fq1nsbng

(The full scene is around 11:30 in the first episode and I think its captures a conversation of subtext and indirectness quite well).

[pjc50]

> English is subtext heavy, like Japanese

My stock joke is that one of these countries is a feudal warrior culture and former empire that's obsessed with tea and saving face, and the other is Japan.

[FearNotDaniel]

> it's not ideal is it?

Oh jeez, I've literally just typed out a message on Teams to describe a situation where someone deployed breaking DB changes without the accompanied app changes as "a less-than-ideal scenario". Sometimes I forget I have to translate from British for the benefit of everyone else on the team (half in India, half in US, one German)

[Oras]

> yeah that's complete bollocks

We say "interesting" for that