Rae’s Rabbit Hole

Artist, Mom, and Spoonie

[impsexual]

[wocinsolidarity]

BLESS

[mockeryd-deactivated20201004]

I’m gonna reblog this forever and ever and ever and ever

[jade-green-butterfly]

This deserves another reblog~~<33

[daddysnewblog666]

❤❤❤

[home-and-having-tea]

Why is horse girl an insult? Sounds like Chad the white boy Apocalypse prepper is bitter I know how to ride an animal that runs away from his nasty ass body spray. Can't even stay on at a trot. What happened to leg day Chad?

[wannacuppatealuv]

Still trying to come to terms with the fact I’ll never be a librarian who can speak a dead language and be recruited by a ruggish but handsome explorer for a quest to lift the curse and save the world

[lustformcgrath]

because of the pandemic travel restrictions?

[brawltogethernow]

Because of the pandemic travel restrictions.

[oh-so-much-adhd]

ADHD hierarchy of needs

[ID: a pyramid with five sections. From bottom to top, they are labelled: window to stare out of; thing to play with; topic of interest; attention; impulse buys. End ID.]

[woundliqour]

[aggressivewhenstartled]

This is why I get meal kits. Do I need them? No. Can I easily make them myself? For way cheaper? Yes. WILL I??? No.

Other tips: if you are going to buy things that aren’t pre-taxed, you need to make a habit of always doing the prep AS SOON AS YOU GET HOME. it will NEVER HAPPEN if you don’t.

Get the bulk pack of steaks! But you are never gonna eat them before they go bad. If you freeze them in individual ziplocks as soon as you unpack you probably will?

Get the celery, but you need to cut it ALL UP and store it in the fridge in water or it will rot.

And don’t do all tgese at once, get like, one or two prep things a trip. You aren’t gonna get it started if it’s a huge task.

[randomslasher]

I love tomato soup. But condensed soup that requires me to have a clean pot, milk, and time to wait for the stovetop will never leave my cupboard. 

Those instant campbells soups though? The ones you just open up, take the metal off, then put the cap back on and microwave? (Hell also the ones that are literally just in a cup?) I’ll go through those within a week of buying them. 

Yeah, they cost more. But I will eat them. Since that’s generally my sole reason for purchasing soup (to consume it), that makes it worth the extra money. 

[adhbabey]

I love frozen dinners, i love them, I get them everytime. Pop in the microwave, boom, it's done. It's great. Simply Choice got real healthy options. Any sort of food I can cook in the microwave or like a toaster oven is pog.

[ghoulslug]

“did you hurt your knee?” “what’s wrong with your legs?” “why do you need that?” “what’s wrong with you?”

i constantly get shit from people in public when i use mobility aids and im over it

ID [ 4 images with a light purple background and a peach colored tilted half square. the black texts on the images reads “stop interrogating disabled people about their mobility aids. other people’s mobility aids are none of your business. why a person is using mobility aids is none of your business. stop demanding the medical history of a stranger in public. ] END ID

[chronicallyjessica]

Uniformed and ignorant people when you tell them you’re too fatigued or in pain to carry on

[ID: A gif of an animated woman saying “but you’re going to power through it.”]

[johnnyjoestarrelatable]

i think it's fucked up that there are plants that decided they wanted to eat meat

[johnnyjoestarrelatable]

a plant's job is literally to just exist but the venus flytrap chose violence

[johnnyjoestarrelatable]

what if i gently laid an uncooked steak on the soil for it to absorb

[iridescentjaq]

my tree biology teacher fed her calcium-deficient tree a whole-ass bbq rib bone - she stuck it in the ground near the base of the tree (after eating the meat off of it), and when she came back to collect it to show the tree biology class it was GONE

the tree had grown a root up through the center of it & out through the sides

also there’s an old story about a man who was buried beneath a tree, and when they went to exhume the body it had been completely absorbed by the tree’s roots- you could see the shape of the body in the way the roots grew, splitting up for clearly defined arms and legs. trees will absolutely eat a steak if you bury it & they need the nutrients.

[johnnyjoestarrelatable]

that’s horrifying! thank you

[tricktster]

As I’ve previously mentioned, I happen to be the proud owner of some truly stupid novelty slippers, which I couldn’t wear until very recently because they terrified the cat. This sucked, because for 10$ novelty slippers from Target, they’re warm as hell.

Fortunately, as you can see, Peanut Butter decided that they were no longer a threat a few weeks ago, so a few hours after they earned her approval I was finally free to wear them to dinner, as I have nobody to impress and it’s cold as hell. Then, of course, my niece saw them.

Now, my 18 month old niece is REALLY into bears right now. Owls are still cool, of course, but BEARS ARE WHERE IT’S AT. And my slipper paws? In her mind, those are the paws of a mighty bear. It was love at first sight. She giggles at them. She pets them like they’re kittens. She scoots onto the floor to rest her head on them during bedtime stories. She becomes immediately alarmed and indignant when I don’t have them on. Or, you know, if I do have them on, but they’re not in her immediate line of sight. “Ba?” She asks. “BA? BA? BA? BAAA? BA?!!!!!” (She is also very big on repetition.)

It has been like this for several weeks now.

Look, I’m an absolute sucker for this kid, and I will do basically anything on earth to make her happy. I’ve been wearing the bear slippers a lot recently. Like a lot a lot. The novelty of the novelty slippers has worn off over the weeks of having half of the word “bear” cooed/screamed at me on repeat.

So, being a problem-solver, I figured I’d get my niece her own pair of paw slippers, as 1. she’d love them, and incidentally 2. If she transferred her affection I could maybe have a meal without being forced by the toddler on the other side of the table to do this pose on command:

(I mean it’s not exactly that pose, but it’s actually even sexier when I do it.)

Anyway, guess what I can’t find in a toddler size? Fucking novelty paw slippers. Seriously, I have done my research, and I don’t believe they’re being manufactured. Hell, I couldn’t even find a sewing pattern for toddler slippers online that looked anywhere close to paws, which is WILD to me, considering that toddlers are basically the target market for animal dress up.

Well.

That’s not entirely true.

See, I did eventually find a pattern for really, really well designed bear paw slippers. Once I hit on the right search terms, I found a LOT of patterns, actually, and more tutorials for how to make them and modify their size than I ever dared hope for. I took the best of several designs, pieced them together, and I’m presently in the process of making them for my niece. Before I show you guys the final product, I wanted to pause for a moment to recognize the people who made this project possible:

Thank you, furries.

Your ingenuity and DIY ethos is an inspiration to us all, and you are going to make a toddler very happy.

[tricktster]

holy SHIT GUYS

FURRIES WORK SO HARD

THIS IS SO HARD

THIS TOOK LIKE 45 hours and it’s just ONE FOOT

[tricktster]

okay okay okay okay

so l encountered an issue, but i’m fine.

i’m gonna be fine.

so I finished the paws. I did it, it took so long, I learned so much, I felt really really great about it, and all that effort was worth it when I saw the sheer disbelief and delight that overtook my niece upon first laying eyes on them

“Ba?” she whispered. Then, “BA? BAAAAAA?!!! SSSSS! BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!”

(she calls me, for reasons best known to her, “Sssss.”)

Anyway, it was exactly the reaction I had been hoping for. It was, very briefly, a perfect resolution to this story.

And then I tried to put them on her feet.

so, to backtrack a little, before embarking on this project I researched a LOT, and I consulted a LOT of different patterns, but the ones I referenced the most were this pattern by Bardic Bestiary and this guide/pattern by @matrices.

I want to be perfectly clear here, not just because Matrices has a tumblr (that is unbelievably full of tutorials and helpful ideas) and therefore might somehow encounter this post, but because both Matrices and the good folks at Bardic Bestiary have honestly made this inscrutable process something that was possible for me, an idiot: What went wrong was not their fault.

So, again, the paws I was trying to make were for a toddler, and toddlers typically lack the requisite resources to purchase and/or create their own fursuits. Given their percentage of the market share, it’s totally reasonable that I wasn’t able to find a pattern specifically for toddlers. But hey, I figured, I’m resourceful, so I just plopped all the pattern pieces into the same Illustrator window, selected the group, and then scaled it all down until the insole pattern piece was 5.25 inches long. Easy.

Everyone with children and/or costuming experience can stop laughing at me right now.

To explain what went wrong, here’s a scientific diagram of a typical adult leg that I made from zooming in on clipart of a soccer player.

And here’s an equally scientific diagram of a toddler’s leg.

In case you can’t see the issue that rapidly became apparent as I tried to shove my niece’s foot into the paws that she now desperately wanted to wear, I will share one further diagram.

Help.

[zarnitza]

You could cut a line a few inches down the front or side or back, whichever is most appealing to you, open it up at the top to the width you need & then insert a triangle piece into that space. Fur or elastic would work. I’d just like put it in by hand with some back stitching & finish any edges with a whip stitch.

That would give you the room at the top you need. When I have a problem i usually find whip stitching can help. It won’t look as pro as what you already made which is amazing btw, but it would work 🤔

Alternatively you could put a cut on each side & just whip stitch the edges. Then you don’t have to add a panel

I hope the half assed diagram makes sense & helps a bit

[tricktster]

Wow, I know I have spent this whole project being very pleasantly surprised at how many people have gone out of their way to share their knowledge and expertise, but I honestly didn’t expect so many people to offer so many genuinely useful ideas. I was incredibly stoked to see @zarnitza​‘s suggestions, because I spent about an hour last night glaring at a pile of snaps, buttons, velcro, and zippers, haphazardly trying to figure out what would be the least annoying technique to add some room for toddler chonk while simultaneously being something that would not be a huge pain in the ass to fasten/unfasten from the ankle of an extremely squirmy kid yelling “BA”.  

What I eventually arrived at was basically what Zarnitza first proposed, with a slight variation. I was still flying blind at this point, so I decided not to do the same procedure on both paws until I was confident it would work. Here’s the way I approached it, which you can feel free to skip if you just want the payoff at the end:

I took out the liner, then ripped the back seam most of the way down the heel on both the faux fur shell and the liners. Then I traced the openings to make a super sloppy triangle template, went through the usual mess of cutting the fur (HOLY SHIT GUYS, EVEN FOLLOWING EVERY SINGLE BIT OF USEFUL ADVICE ON HERE, FUR IS ANNOYING TO WORK WITH), the much easier task of cutting fleece for the liner, and I sewed both the shell and the liner back up. As promised, this left me with a MUCH wider ankle. Easy to put on… but also easy to fall off/trip over. 

So here is where I think I might actually have been clever, I took the fur shell and I stitched in two elastic cords on either side of the triangle piece I’d just added, like this:

Okay, that’s an unintelligible diagram, but you get the point. Elastic bands, sewed in place with enough tension that the slippers would stay on her feet without cutting off her circulation, since that sort of thing is frowned upon. Finally, I put the liner back in, folded it over the shell, and stitched the cuff into place by hand. End result? 

I know you guys can’t see this (because I obscured it with a bear emoji) but holy shit… if she was this happy with ONE paw, I can’t wait to see what she thinks about getting to wear TWO of them tomorrow…. which will actually happen, because I just finished the final stitches on the second paw. They’re done. 

Thank you so much to everyone who helped me in any way during this long, weird journey I decided to take. I knew that this whole thing was pretty damn wholesome going in, but I honestly didn’t expect that I’d encounter the efforts of so many people who clearly put the time in learning how to make something, and put even more time in to share that knowledge with anyone who wanted to learn how to do it too. I’ve been feeling so bummed about what the past year has suggested about the average person’s willingness to sacrifice in order to help someone else out, and this was kind of a nice reminder that there are plenty of generous, thoughtful, genuinely brilliant people out there who just want to share something they love with the world… and a lot of those people, as it turns out, are furries. 

In conclusion, if I encounter anyone talking even the vaguest hint of shit about furries from hereon out, I will go to that person’s house and put a house centipede in their ear while they’re sleeping. 

[tricktster]

This is officially my final update on the bear slipper saga:

Not to get too emotional here but…

BA!!!!!!

[myalgicencephalomyelitiscfstom]

https://twitter.com/StevePhillipsMD/status/1335256353426780161?s=20

[myalgicencephalomyelitiscfstom]

https://twitter.com/p0ppyfield/status/1333817610090258432?s=20

[eggmacguffin]

ADHD tip for "put it down without thinking/no object permanence" disease:

if youve misplaced a small handheld object, walk around your house or apartment and act like it's in your hand (hold your hand like you would holding your phone or keys for example). as you go around, watch where your hands naturally drift as you turn corners, walk past bookcases, etc.

9 times out of 10 you'll find your phone or keys or whatever sitting there. goood luck ily

[eudaemxn]

Even better, pick up an item as a proxy and build a dragon’s nest of trickets around your phone

[best-shower-thoughts]

The upside of dementia is that you can hide your own Easter Eggs. (source)

[holymolyhotcannoli]

I don’t need dementia to do that. I got adhd and the object permanence of a newborn. I could set the eggs down , forget where I put them, and then never find them again. No need to hide them

[secretaskgamestash]

following that, there’s also nothing wrong with liking some gendered terms and not others! 

it’s okay to use she/her pronouns but not want to be called a girl! it’s okay to use terms like brother or father for yourself but not go by he/him! it’s okay to be fine with “sister” but not “daughter!” it’s okay to use a title like “mr” but not want to be called a man! it’s okay to be a woman and not go by she/her!

it’s okay to use language that seems to contradict itself! language and gender have a complicated relationship but you’re the boss! bend it to your will!

[scavengerridley]

Natalie Portman being confused by the fact that you have to say “hi” to someone before starting a conversation in France got me like ?????

[jmenfoot]

“I feel there’s a lot of rules of politeness and codes of behavior there you have to follow. […] A friend of mine taught me that when you go in some place you have to say “bonjour” before you say anything else, then you have to wait two seconds before you say something else. So if you go into a store you can’t be like “do you have this in another size,” or they’ll think you’re super rude and then they’ll be rude to you.” [X]

[there-is-irony-everywhere]

#wait you don’t do this is other countries??

[emilievitnux]

So that’s it guys. French are not rude, we just don’t like it when people don’t say “Hello” or “Hi” when they start a conversation. 

Don’t everyone say “Hi” before they ask something to someone? What’s next? Saying please is also a french thing or others countries does that too? 

[vintagegalpal]

Canada is similar. We say sorry and please. The Hello thing seems strange, but it actually makes sense.

[mayitbeaneveningstar-deactivate]

Bro, this threw me for a loop when I moved up north. Like in the southern United States you say “Hi, how are you?” And then make a few seconds of small talk before you ask your question or order your food and when I went to Connecticut they were like “What do you want?” Without any hello or anything. In other places they just STARE at you waiting on you to place your order and gtfo.

I laid my hand over my chest the first time, and the only way to describe my look was “aghast” before I said “Good lord!” My husband said it’s the most southern thing he’s seen me do. He thought it was hilarious. But…. Like??? That’s rude as fuck??????? Don’t y'all say say “Hello” before throwing your demands at someone??

[bye9000-deactivated20170123]

maybe this is why everyone thinks new yorkers are rude

[darkseid-deactivated20190806]

this is absolutely why ppl think new englanders r rude. no one has any fucking manners

[vmprsm]

african culture, at least in ghana, demands you greet a person before you ask them something. if youre in an open market they may even ignore you if you dont.

[fluffmugger]

We do this in Australia as well. If you just started straight off saying “yeah I want XXXX” we’d think you’re rude as all fuck.  You say hi, then make your request.  It’s basic acknowledgement of the other person as a person rather than some random request-filling machine.

[xparrot]

Huh. Speaking as a New Englander, I usually go with “Excuse me,” but sometimes “hi” or “hey,” but with no pause – it’ll be, “Excuse me, hi, I was looking for X?” From my POV, it seems rude to get too chatty and waste some stranger’s time; I assume they have better things to do than make small talk with me, so I just get my request out there so they can answer me and get back to whatever needs doing. I always thank folks for their help afterwards, if that helps?

(The rules of etiquette are strange. People say New Englanders are rude and cold, but once during an unexpected snowstorm here in Seattle, my car got stuck and I was standing by the side of the road at a busy intersection in the snow for half an hour waiting for my housemate to come pick me up, and not a single person stopped. Back in Massachusetts, every other car on the road would’ve been pulling up to check to see if I was okay, if my phone was working, did I need a lift, etc.)

[survivablyso]

No but this was the first thing my cousin told me in France? you never ever ever start a conversation with anyone, not even like “Nice weather today, huh?” without saying Bonjour first. You HAVE to greet them or, just like Ghana, they’ll ignore the shit out of you, you rude little fucker

(And “excuse me” or “pardon me” doesn’t cut it. you still have to open with bonjour)

[and I can’t speak for New England but coming from Chicago and then moving Out West where the culture is VERY influenced by the South and DETERMINED to think of themselves as small town folk… I HATE when I have to make small talk before ordering food??? Like, if it’s a coffee shop that’s pretty much empty I’ll chit chat for a few seconds, but I’m still not going to make inane conversation about the weather unless the weather is extreme.

In a big city it is rude as fuck to waste my time making small talk with me when we are not even friends or neighbors??? I am here to get shit done. There are four other people in line behind me, and I don’t want to waste their time. I am here, I HAVE MY ORDER ALREADY DECIDED BY THE TIME I GET TO THE FRONT BECAUSE I AM NOT A CAVE WOMAN, and I am being polite by saying both Please and Thank You and not wasting other people’s daylight.]

[teapotsahoy]

I live in a small northern city, and I feel it would be rude to engage someone in more than maaaaaybe a sentence of small talk before placing my order. In addition to feeling I was wasting their time, I’d feel like I was demanding emotional labour (small-talk is emotional labour for *me*) that they weren’t being paid to give.

[giandujakiss-deactivated2021081]

so bizarre.  New Yorker here.  Saying hi, how are you, etc before these kinds of commercial interactions is what’s rude to me - because ffs, there are people in line behind you, we have lives, move it along.  It’s really just a dramatic cultural difference - but borne of a real practical necessity.

[feminismandhappiness]

Oh my god saying ‘hi’ takes less than A SINGLE SECOND YOU ARE NOT WASTING ANYBODY’S TIME In Spain you have to say hello to people before you talk to them even people who work in retail deserve that bare minimum courtesy hello??

[animatedamerican]

Transplanted New Yorker here, and the feeling here is: people who work in retail deserve the bare minimum courtesy you would afford anyone else, which is to not waste their time.  You maybe say a half-second “hi” and/or possibly “excuse me” to be sure you have their attention, then you get to the point as quickly and concisely as possible.  You don’t wait to get a “hi” back, you probably don’t ask “how are you”, you definitely don’t talk about the weather.  You smile and keep your tone of voice courteous-to-friendly, you say please, you thank them when you’re done, and you do. not. waste. their. time.

Except ”time” is really only shorthand for the concept:  you don’t intrude on their lives more than you have to.  NY is a very very crowded city which allows for very little personal space, so New Yorkers have developed a form of courtesy that involves minimizing our unavoidable intrusions on each other.  Which is why we hold doors without making eye contact, and why we tend to feel that in any interaction with a stranger, it’s actively rude to do anything but get to the point immediately.

[dalniente]

Interesting discussion of regional differences in conversational convention.  But the amount of “my way is the right way; everyone else is super rude and also wrong” going on in this post is giving me hives.  

Hey.  Listen.  "Polite” and “rude” are relative concepts.  Something you were taught was rude may not be seen as rude elsewhere, and might even be the polite thing to do.  Conversely, something you might have been taught was polite might be seen as rude elsewhere.  Saying “no one has any manners” about a group of people whose culture and, by extension, whose conversational expectations work differently than yours is really arrogant. 

[yamitamiko]

In the US the thumbs up means good job or great. In France and Germany it means one, they start counting with the thumb instead of the index finger. In Greece it’s an obscene sexual gesture.

This guy I knew in college worked with the campus d/Deaf/HoH group and told a story about the dinner they had to welcome everyone in. They were trying to tell this little old lady what one of the dishes was, something casserole I forget what kind, and she was getting really flustered. Finally they figured out they were speaking to her in ASL and she was from South Africa. The ASL sign for whatever it was (spinach maybe?) in South African Sign means sex. They were offering this little old lady a sex casserole.

There’s an Italian toast ‘chin chin’, mimicking the sound of the glasses clinking together. It becomes hilarious when Japanese folks are around since in Japanese chin means penis.

As for the South, I will bet you anything that how we have conversations at the register stemmed from the homestead days when a farmer would come in to town maybe once a month and this would be the only time they’d get to talk to someone they didn’t live with. I like talking with customers! If I can get them to smile then it’s a victory and I have a better day for it. It only becomes emotional labor if they’re an outright ass or are sexually harassing me. But in the big crammed city of New York it makes sense to take the get your shit and get out approach, people have a subway to catch. Out here I had to drive myself anyway since it’s fifteen minutes to the edge of town from where I live, so what does it matter if I spend an extra minute at the register?

It’s important to be aware of the differences and ultimately there’s a degree of ‘when in Rome’ that has to happen. Someone who moves from Greece to the US is going to be startled by the amount of thumbs up but ultimately they’re going to have to adjust. Someone from the US is probably going to be shocked that telling someone they did a good job was taken as an insult and they similarly are going to have to adjust. Mom’s a damn Yankee transplant and said it was weird moving to the South and having cashiers younger than her daughter call her dear, but that’s just what we do. Sweetheart, darling, honey, sugar, they don’t have overtly romantic/sexual connotations here. As long as there’s not a leer attached to it if a guy calls me ‘sugar’ when I’m at work it doesn’t parse as a flirt because it’s not one, it parses the same as if he called me ‘miss’. But when a busload of Californians came through it took me three people to realize that ‘baby’ was not flirting, it was just California. NOTHING is universal.

This is the biggest place I’ve ever worked so it took some getting used to, like any skill, but even being socially awkward it’s easy to tell what scripts to follow. Test the waters, if they don’t respond then okay this is a move them through kind of person, be quick and efficient and to the point, feel good when they smile at ‘last question I promise, do you want your receipt’. If they do then pull out the five small talk scripts, get a smile, feel good when they laugh at the cat small talk script.

It’s also important to note that claiming your culture’s way of doing polite right is a fantastic way to fall into some really bigoted nonsense. In Puerto Rico the personal bubble is much smaller than in the US proper, like RIGHT at your elbow close. I had a cashier who was super uncomfortable because our steward was getting in her personal space constantly and he was pissed off because he was trying to HELP her with moving orders why is she mad at him? Once I sat them down and explained the difference they both had this aw shit moment because from their own standpoints they were being polite and from the others’ standpoints they were being rude. After that they were fine, when he got a little too close she’d say ‘whoa man my bubble’ and he’d laugh and shake is head and step back.

Lots of non-white cultures have things like that, particularly since white America has serious problems with sexualizing ANY physical contact to the point we’re all touch starved. The normal speaking voice is at a higher volume or it’s more acceptable to show your emotions or gesture when you speak. None of this is WRONG, but when people star getting into ‘my culture is the only right culture’ then guess who comes out on top? It ain’t the little guy.

[curlicuecal]

One of my labmates was from Poland, and she had a tendency to come off as kind of abrupt and brusk, verging on mean. In particular, when she was providing feedback on a presentation or paper she could come across as SUPER cutting. Which was not her intention! From the way she would explain it, we had a running joke in the lab, “it sounds nicer in Polish.”

And this is actually true; there are scientific articles comparing the cultural contexts for communication! It’s really neat.

So in (most parts of) America, we equate indirectness with politeness. “Excuse me, would it be possible for you to perhaps pass me that salt, if you don’t mind?” The more roundabout you are, the more we consider that a signal of social courtesy.

In Poland, not only is indirectness viewed as rudely wasting the listener’s time, but directness is viewed as communicating intimacy and friendliness. “Give me the salt.”

…It sounds nicer in Polish. :)

[sgramajo]

Omg I love this

[ahollowyear]

The Effects of Capital, Labor, and Class on Local Etiquette Across International Boundaries

[hideki16seiyuu]

When I moved to Oklahoma, the first time I went through a drive through the person over the intercom said something to the affect of “hi, how are you today?” and me, a Marinite in California where everyone is in a hurry responded without thinking, “give me a second.” while looking at the menu. My girlfriend, who grew up in the South, was SHOCKED because I’m not a rude person but that’s not how you speak to people in the South at all!

Same thing when I rolled into the dollar general a few months later and the cashier, a guy in his 50’s-60’s, called me “sweetie”. In California if I had heard an older man call me something like that, I would’ve been EXTREMELY uncomfortable, but this guy waz just genuinely being nice and not predatorial to me (that was clear by his tone), and I was pretty taken aback.

[fuckingconversations]

And if you look to your left, you can see the cultural trends of “Direct” vs “Indirect” styles of communication causing distress when one group meets the other and isn’t prepared for that style. 

“ In U.S. Americans, Australians, Germans, and Anglo Canadians, literal truthfulness as well as efficiency in communication are highly valued and to some extent are a higher priority than personal or political sensitivities, especially in a business setting. Saying “No” or “I don’t know” is considered both honest and respectful of the party, since it does not mislead them or lead to “game-playing.” Problems are felt to be solved more rapidly if open and frank discussion is encouraged.”

“ In indirect cultures, on the other hand (Japanese, Chinese, Indians, Saudi Arabians, for example), directly communicating negative information is seen as impolite and crude, even in a business setting. In these situations, polite excuses or evasions, which both parties usually know and recognize as such, are given, and in extreme cases even outright fictions are invented—again with recognition by both parties that a diplomatic strategy is being employed. Problems are felt to be solved more productively if they are handled with tact and discretion. “

And of course, communication styles vary between individuals within the same culture - Southern U.S. Americans are more likely to be Indirect, and Northern ones are more likely to be Direct, but you’ll still find Indirect or Direct mixed in everywhere. 

[sugarfey]

Another cultural distinction I find really interesting is the use of first names vs surnames. If you go to a hospital in Australia, the doctors and nurses will refer to you by your first name right from the start, whereas when I was visiting my grandmother in hospital in Germany, all the staff referred to patients as ‘Mr or Mrs So-and-So.’ Calling a patient by their first name would be considered rude unless you have been explicitly invited to do so. 

Of course, politeness can often be a generational thing as well. My grandmother has known some of the people in her neighbourhood for over thirty years and they still refer to each other by surnames and use the formal ‘sie’ form when saying ‘you,’ however, I’ve noticed many Germans my age who don’t use the ‘sie’ form for others of our generation at all, regardless of how well they know each other. This is pretty confusing for me as a semi-outsider, as I’m not as well versed in all the social complexities of when you do or don’t use the ‘sie’ form as opposed to ‘du.’ I tend to default to the ‘sie’ form when addressing people I don’t know as it seems safer to come across as overly formal rather than rude.

[thesummoningdark]

Another thing that can lead to people from other cultures appearing rude is the unspoken conversational cues around who gets to speak next, etc. I’m scottish, and a few years ago I was having a drink with three visiting american friends, and I ended up getting quite upset because I was constantly being spoken over when to my mind it was clearly my “turn” to speak.

[caledoniaseries]

I’m working-class northern Minnesotan and moved to Scotland. Scots (and other British people generally) are much much more indirect than we are. There’s also an assumption that everyone understands the subtext of UK communication when we really, really don’t.

The most frustrating conversation I ever had about this was with an English women who kept insisting that the British way was the polite one and everyone else on earth was a barbarian. She really couldn’t fathom that other cultures do not see the same type of behaviour as polite.

[mentallyrecovering]

[wordfather]

things are going to be difficult. But you

[rascalbot]

are going to be difficulter

[wordfather]

thats the spirit!!!!! be a problem to your problems!!!!!!!!! mark your territory! !!!!!!!