The slightness of British difference

This is a short post about how trying to be polite can be very confusing for someone from a different culture.

It took me sometimes to realize that. I'm in England at the moment, attending some courses and I've asked different questions to my teachers. Three or four times it happened that someone or myself said something completely unrelated to what the teacher was explaining and she said: That is a slightly different situation.
And again: That is slightly different from my example. Or: That is slightly different from what we are doing here. Therefore, I recorded in my mind that what I said or my colleagues said was similar (that is what slightly different means) to the teacher's examples. For three weeks I thought I was, and my colleagues were, almost right. So I kept the two alternative examples in mind as both possible.

For three weeks. Until, I finally understood! It was an epiphany for me!

In England, when you say something completely out of topic, your interlocutor will say that it is slightly different from what she or he meant.

So, if you come, like me, from a culture where you "call a cat a cat" (beautiful French saying that goes: Appeler un chat un chat, meaning call things with their real name) you could be puzzled. Politeness can be misleading, because you don't understand what people really mean, and if they really mean what they are saying, included in an academic environment where you wish to clearly understand as much as you can and go back home with consistent and meaningful information.

As I mentioned in my previous post, Polite or not polite, this is the question, politeness can mean something starkly different in different cultures, and here I am arguing that it can even be confusing and cause problems.

All this is fun! But... be careful!

E.