91–100 of 377 posts
It also made me realize that a lot of the small social details we take for granted might seem really jarring or even rude in another culture.
This "high power distance" culture contributed to several airline crashes in the 80s and 90s because people under the captain wouldn't dare to question the captain's decisions. One in particular: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Flight_801
Assuming the "power distance" is pre-existing - I find honorifics make it much easier to challenge someone in authority. If you start with a Mr/Mrs Blah or Professor Blah and then present critcism.. it typically comes off better. B/c you are showing you're not too chummy and you're strongly implying you respect them (at least somewhat). Ex: You're in a lecture and you tell your professor "Professor X, I think on slid…
A friend (not Korean) said on his 29th birthday that he's starting his 30th year of life. It was an interesting perspective, because in general we celebrate our nth birthday after completing n years of life.
Under this system, the number of distinct powers that you were influenced by is more important than the exact number of days or years that you spent on this planet. Korean culture is still saturated with this stuff. You can DM a shaman your date of birth, and they'll use this kind of system to tell your fortunes.
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Would addressing you by your mail address work ? Handling people's name is I think the bane of our field, and leads to many of the awful choices like forcing fields with a first and last name for instance, or requesting people's gender to properly set the Mr and Mrs. As a dev I'm not happy about it, as a user I hate it, I'm not sure the majority of people are happy either with the current state of things. Accepting t…
If you mean snail mail address, no it wouldn't. It's common to share these between people who have the same last (or sometimes first) names. Things get really fun when it's. both, e.g. a man marrying somebody who has the same first name as their sister. This actually happened in my (distant) family. If you mean an email (or the part before the @), also no. People sometimes sign up from addresses like contact@example.…
I was going for the principle that we're not trying to mimic human emotions when it's a mail to remind you to accept the latest TOS.
So, no "Dear", no trying to come up with something socially acceptable, just plain "miki123211@hn.xx, please review our newest Terms and Services at https://....../...."
The "what should we call you" field sounds attractive, but would be ripe for abuse IMHO. Not on technical terms, but users would definitely play with it to have you send "Mrs DeepshitFuckHorse please confirm your email at...." to random addresses for instance, or any other vector that we're not thinking about right now.
From the perspective of national and social development, this is definitely a dross culture. This system similar to hierarchy seemingly increases the courtesy among people. However, it more often leads to age bullying, blind obedience to the elders, and hinders resistance and innovation. Influenced by Confucian culture, China doesn't have such a perverted etiquette system at all.
Every way has its pros and cons. Having an age related hierarchy might have benefits like societal coherence or stability. I am not a proponent of it, I just acknowledge my inability to fully grasp the impact and ramifications as to label one as superior and the other as "perverted".
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This reminds me, it's actually very interesting how English movies get translated into Korean and vice versa, since the nuances mentioned in the article are hard to translate / convey in the other language.
In Tamatoa's musical number in Moana , he spontaneously breaks into French for a single line of his song, "c'est la vie, mon ami". This is not expected to cause problems for English-speaking audiences. I thought it was interesting to see how foreign language dubs handled that line. Sometimes they translate the French into the dub language as if it had just been English like the rest of the song. Sometimes they leave…
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It's a generational thing. There has definitely been a change in recent years, especially the younger generation can no longer do much with the formal “Sie”, but of course they know it. I am 46 years old and have grown up with and been familiar with the “Du/Sie” dichotomy from the very beginning. It also has many advantages and offers clear relationships: There is no ambiguity as to which pronouns I use to address so…
Interesting how you write "Du" and not "du". I'm French and I've been living in Germany for 20 years. I understand and use "du/Sie" more or less appropriately (we have the same dichotomy in French). What I still cannot wrap my head around after all this time is why/when some people use "du/Du", "dein/Dein", "dich/Dich" in writing (to be clear: not at the beginning of a sentence). I guess "Du" is somewhere inbetween "…
Sometimes it's written "Du" even if in the middle of the sentence when addressing someone directly. It's technically incorrect, but it's used for emphasis and hence politeness, and that's probably where your feeling comes from.
The same can happen with other words that are getting capitalized for similar reasons, but when going strictly by the book it's grammatically incorrect. An example would be "das Große Ganze" where it should be "große" but it is capitalized to emphasize the connection/phrase.
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Giving respect based on seniority is one of the major reasons why autocracies thrive unchecked in some countries as younger people are unable to hold older folks accountable.
In its extreme shapes maybe, but just paying respect to the elders for having lived much longer and seen so much more, is something that should be normal in my opinion.
In a way that would be a good barometer of how that society thinks it's doing and how promising the younger generation sees its future, as prepared by their elders.
It's all the more interesting in countries where the population pyramid if fully reversed, and elders have way more power than the younger working class.
From the perspective of national and social development, this is definitely a dross culture. This system similar to hierarchy seemingly increases the courtesy among people. However, it more often leads to age bullying, blind obedience to the elders, and hinders resistance and innovation. Influenced by Confucian culture, China doesn't have such a perverted etiquette system at all.
Typical cultural superiority bias. Every way has its pros and cons. Having an age related hierarchy might have benefits like societal coherence or stability. I am not a proponent of it, I just acknowledge my inability to fully grasp the impact and ramifications as to label one as superior and the other as "perverted".
Hierarchies invite revolt and need a lot of force to keep in place.
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Interesting, as a German (which also has a similar system), I am the complete opposite, I find it super irritating when people address me by my last name. And the worst part is having to figure out how to address others, especially people you've known for a while but aren't really close to, e.g. say long-time neighbors I rarely meet. Luckily, in the IT industry, it's common to just use first names with everybody.
Yes. I find addressing people by surname uniquely stupid. Like are you calling the person or the historical clan? It perhaps made sense for medieval lords to address their underlings as if they were interchangeable, in our modern context that has largely done away with royalty, using surnames makes no sense. It becomes even more interesting when traditionally cultures (like mine) don't use surnames, but modern IT sys…