zlacker

>>femfos+(OP)
I'm a bit sad about how eager everyone is jumping on the idea that "candid advice" will always be construed as possibly sexist. I'm from Germany and we are famously blunt, so maybe there is a cultural aspect to this, but to me candor != risk of sexism. If your advice is candid, it also shouldn't leave any ambiguity..."I'm unsure about you doing the pitch because the last N times you froze up and you seem nervous again" makes your reasoning clear without beating around the bush. How can you twist this into something sexist?

>>igorkr+5i
A lot of Americans of any gender would be put off by a lot of very routine and candid professional communications that happen in Germany. I find American English in general to be tending toward the near universal avoidance of direct speech and statements, independent of speaker/listener identity.

Importantly the speaker and listener are not consciously aware of this happening. The net result is that you can say literal/plain thing A and the listener can hear literal/plain thing B.

Speaking to Americans requires a significantly accurate modeling of the listener's mind and expectations to be able to be clearly understood, much much moreso than any other language I have studied or even heard of.

Basically, it is very easy to be totally misunderstood when using plain, literal speech (such as is common in Germany or in Slavic countries).

I've written about it: https://sneak.berlin/20191201/american-communication/

>>sneak+sJ
Very interesting to read. I wonder if some of this is due to neutral statements in English tending to carry a negative connotation. If I say "I want to come over tomorrow but I'm not sure if I can make it" - that actually means "I do not want to come over tomorrow".

You /can't/ communicate without euphemisms, and trying to will always fail and make you seem like a dick even though you're just being straightforward. That is likely where the difficulty you've experienced comes from.

(For context, your exact situation occurred this weekend. I was invited to an event and said yes, but both me and my friend knew that I would not attend)

>>soared+j31
You shouldn't lie in a response to an invitation.

>>sneak+G41
We’re lost the formal flowery language of the English which was designed to communicate things like this more precisely - “I regret that I will be unable to attend but I appreciate the invitation and cherish our relationship” or similar.