eatingmuffinsinanagitatedmanner:
“You don’t have to say thank you, it’s their job.”
YOU ARE LITERALLY THE WORST PERSON
Why would you teach your child to be rude and ungrateful. Literally why.
Fun fact: My mom taught me to thank EVERYONE. I thank the bus driver, I thank the guy at the Taco Bell drive-through window…I THANK THE TACO BELL MACHINE THE PERSON TALKS THROUGH. The sad thing is…almost everyone I know thinks this is weird. I’ve had people look at me funny because I thank the bus driver for being there because if he wasn’t I couldn’t get home safely. My friends question me because I’m thanking Taco-Bell guy because where else am I going to get cheap, crappy, delicious food for 3 drunk ass people at 2am?
It’s called being a human being. Try it.
If someone does something, anything from doing dishes to picking up something you dropped to holding the door for you, you say thank you. They did something for you they didn’t have to so they deserve a thank you. It’s called appreciating the community you live in and the people around you.
For real. A lesson men in particular need to learn.
what kind of monster doesn’t thank the bus driver?
Well okay, but this is cultural, so it’s not so much called being a human being as being a human being from a particular society. (I wonder what society that might be here, gee such a mystery)
After my first America vacation, I’d gotten used to all the ridiculous amounts of thank yous, so when my mom said, “I brought you a donut,” I said, “Thank you,” and then she felt extremely insulted, because she’s my mother, and thank yous are for strangers.
Can I ask questions about this? I just find that really interesting. Is it because thanks are implied with family/close friends? Or because it’s assumed that someone you’re close to will do nice things for you, so to thank them for it is to suggest otherwise? Or is there some other reasoning? (Maybe it’s just pure cultural difference, I don’t know, but I’d just find it really interesting if there was a reason.)
My theory is that Americans and Canadians are so explicit about politeness because they’re immigration-based societies, and when so many different cultures come together, you have no choice to go to etiquette ground zero, or everybody will feel insulted by the other one’s unspoken cultural gestures all the time.
I don’t know how Germany compares to other European countries, but I’m almost sure that none of them are as verbally polite as North-America. I think a lot of them are about the same level of explicit about it as Germany, though likely in different ways. Sometimes I see, say, fic written by a British person and I recognize a polite phrase or gesture that we’d use here too.
We’ve just had a much longer time to grow it, you know? And to reach a consensus about what constitutes politeness. And less immigration or outside influence, so less confusion.
Anyway we have this concept of “Selbstverständlichkeit” that doesn’t even translate into English clean. “Common courtesy” is what comes closest, I think. You can translate “of course” with “selbstverständlich” and then “Selbstverständlichkeit” is the noun for that. It’s a thing that goes unspoken, it’s understood, it’s the standard of what’s gonna happen. So yeah, the consensus in our family is that a caring mom will provide you with food, and if I want to show my gratitude I’ll say something like, “Oh, awesome!” but I don’t say “Thank you,” that’s rude, because if I love my mom than I should not be setting such a low bar of what can be expected of her. It’s what she’s always done after all; the fact that I can reliably count on her to bring me food in this particular situation is an expression of her love that I’m not going to doubt. Or like, one of the first long fics I wrote in English starts with a soldier visiting another soldier, who he doesn’t know well, in sickbay. And both my betas got confused about why he would do that and what’s his motivation for doing that? While the Germans I asked, when trying to figure this out, understood that this is a way of showing how particularly kind and caring that guy is, since it’s assumed you will visit people in the hospital if they’re sick here. It’s just what you do. And you know, I don’t think more Germans visit people in the hospital than Americans. It’s just that here, you have to explain why you didn’t, while in America, you have to explain why you do, I guess? German readers would have understood that the character made the visit because that’s what you do; but they would also have understood that the majority of people in his situation wouldn’t have, so he must be a particularly good guy.
The other way around, speaking of the American expectation ground zero, in the first two years or so in the relationship with my American girlfriend, we had a lot of fights that were basically caused by her saying, “I acknowledge your feelings” which to me is one of the rudest things you can say to your partner or friend, because it is understood by me that my partner will acknowledge my feelings. What else should she do, assume that my feelings aren’t there? I don’t even have that shitty a relationship with my boss! 😀 But of course in Germany you get just as many people in relationships ignoring their partners feelings, it’s just that we approach it with an expectancy that that won’t happen. And here, too, “I acknowledge your feelings” doesn’t even translate to anything. You can’t even express that sentiment in German.
Another factor might be that German has a class of words English doesn’t, which is the so-called particles, which are inserted into sentences to indicate levels of politeness. If you want to distinguish in English between ordering somebody to close the window and asking them politely to do so, you can use “may” and “please” but in German you can leave out the “please” entirely because your choice of particles allows you to add various degrees of politeness to the sentence. And the particular way you phrase that also indicates whether or not you should say thank you once the window is closed. I think that’s a big reason why Germans are supposed to be so rude. Particles are the hardest part of German to learn for foreigners, and most non-native speakers just can’t read them well. The other way around, it’s hard for Germans to adjust to other modes of politeness in other societies when they’ve suddenly been deprived of their natural way of expressing it.
And of course, if I ask a German a favor although I know that thing will be hard for them, I’ll say it swiftly and barely with any attention on it (”Oh hey, could you stop referring to that as x? Ta, mate”) because that will allow the other person to say no in the same tone, rather than forcing them to make a big deal out of why they won’t do it. I only made the mistake of trying that with an American once; the fight was epic. :p (on the other hand, I once asked an American a favor saying, “I know you’re very reluctant about sharing your real name on the internet so please just tell me if you don’t want to do it and I absolutely will understand” and rather than taking that out she replied, “Nah, I don’t feel like doing that” and I just got… really mad at her because when a German goes to the trouble of outlining why a favor is important it’s important and I wouldn’t have asked if it wasn’t and I wasn’t fucking around here)
Can’t speak for other European countries but over here it’s expected that you’ll thank basically anyone for doing anything for you 😛
Like if I ask someone to pass me the salt, no matter their age, I’ll say thanks when they do (and it’s expected that they’ll do the same). It’s the same word every time too, but the tone of voice or deformation you apply to it that indicate informal speech (like, with my family, sometimes I’ll say it more like ‘mercy’ than ‘merci’ or go for a playful ‘thank you’ in a horrible French accent that makes it sound like I’m saying ‘your ass’ in French)
So yeah, not thanking your mom for bringing you food would feel weird to me too xD
I’m with you on the hospital visit thing though–over here you explain why you don’t, too.
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