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Comment by ThePadawan | Hacker News Reader

> (...) tensions began to rise between the French and the U.S. military personnel stationed in the country, with the former seeing the latter as arrogant and wanting to flaunt their wealth, and the latter seeing the former as proud and resentful.

Well. I mean...

Joking aside, the text is amazingly blunt and honest, in a rather refreshing way.

  "The French don't bathe."


  The French don't bathe often enough. They can't. They don't have real soap. (...) The Germans took the soap.

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I like the fact that the French didn't like American presence on their sole and had offensive feelings towards that, while at the same time, they were forcefully present all over Africa with totalitarian and oppressive military administrations.

In Algeria, many fought in WW2 as part of the French Expeditionary Corps (e.g; my great-grandfather) with the hope that in case the allies win, Algerians could possibly negotiate some sort of self-governance. on the 8th of May 45, thousands of Algerians protested for independence. The civilians faced an immediate annihilation by the French military [1], resulting in up to 30,000 dead civilians. And who can believe this happened in the aftermath of ending NAZI Germany?!!!! I mean that's very ironic but well ...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9tif_and_Guelma_massacre

A lot of the allied leaders get a better historical reputation because they’re naturally compared to their opponent, Hitler. Without Hitler there as a foil, most of them would be treated far worse by history.

Charles de Gaulle should get more crap over his behavior in Algeria than he does. Same for Churchill and his behavior in India.

Geopolitical ambitions were well beyond the daily awareness of French citizens, moreover, we don't know what the average French citizens view on those things would be.

Most of them just lived through existential horror.

It's true. Europeans of that era did not bathe everyday. My stepfather escaped nazi Germany, and moved to the us in the 40s. He grudgingly adapted to daily bathing (my mother's insistence), but remarked how very American that is. He was very 20th century European, for sure.

(European here) my grandparents bathed I think once per week, we often joked about this in the family. My uncle who is a commercial construction inspector/engineer arranged for a full bathroom model a couple years before they died. When we went to sell the house he complained the bathroom was unused and looked the same as the day he signed off on it.

Despite this, they never smelled bad to me, they certainly had a recognizable smell, but it wasn't foul. Contrasting with myself, if I don't shower for a day, I'll get remarks from my girlfriend the next afternoon, and on the third day I smell so foul I can smell it myself. I also get more randomly itchy.

I wonder if by showering daily I'm somehow tampering with my bodies ability to fend off some foul smelling bacteria or something. Besides fearing to smell bad for a couple weeks (months?) to find out, I also enjoy showering to start my day fresh and I like the way it makes my hair feel.

A young Steve Jobs famously thought that as long as you ate a certain diet, you could skip showering/deodorant and still smell ok. His coworkers/manager at Atari did not agree and put him on the night shift: https://techpp.com/2017/02/24/steve-jobs-facts-you-might-not...

I think once your body is used to showering daily, it is never the same in terms of microbes, or it takes years to get back to whatever.

I need to bathe daily. If I don't I get a sore under my arm, and I can smell myself.

I had a girlfriend, well kinda, who didn't believe in showering, and she did smell. I never had the nerve to tell her.

My grandfather didn't bath, and didn't have an odor. He was small, and very skinny though.

My best friend didn't bath, and he did smell. I should have habituated to his smell since I saw him so much, but no. His smell was so bad, I needed to put down a towel before he sat on any chair.

I saw my grandfather once a year.

There might be other factors too, like changing into pajamas at night (possibly changing underwear or no underwear), and then fresh clothes in the morning?

As for hair, there's a whole "no shampoo" movement, takes a few weeks for the scalp to adjust.

To what extent is someone's "smell" a product of their local dermal biome and what they've been inoculated with, so to speak, via sharing deodorant, clothing, activity level, diet, etc?

Smelly armpits are due to particular strains of bacteria that feed on sweat compounds and skin cells. If you haven’t been infected with the stinky ones you might last two days in moderate weather. Get infected and the time goes down to two hours. I found out the hard way, sharing a bar of soap. Avoid. :-/

Yes

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/07/hygiene...

>It's true. Europeans of that era did not bathe everyday.

Americans of a very close earlier ear didn't bathe everyday either...

Many Americans of the exact same era probably didn't bathe every day.

And true in Europe today. Ever been on a train in Germany in the summertime?

Ever been on the L in Chicago in a car without working air conditioning?

Spoiler: Everybody stinks.

Wrong. Try Japan. They're clean, polite, and courteous. Crowded trains in August (like all year) are surprisingly absent of body odor (and litter, and noisy people, ...).

Different folks are indeed different in some ways.

Well if you want to compare Japan to other countries, you should be aware that the fear of being a burden to others due to one's body odor is a very Japanese phenomenon [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taijin_kyofusho

Asians sweat less and their sweat does not stink as much for some reason.

I read that body odor is controlled by the same gene as the one for ear wax.

People with wet/creamy ear wax smell. People with dry/crumbly earwax don't smell.

I'm not sure if it's true in general, but it's true for me and my partner.

One of our kids has creamy ear wax, and the other has crumbly ear wax. I'm curious if only one of them will need deodorant once they get to puberty...

Genetics is fun.

https://udel.edu/~mcdonald/mythearwax.html

Didn't the Asians refer to the Portuguese as "garlic eaters"? When one eats garlic, the scent comes out in the sweat - so you can smell them coming.

From my own experience, if I eat garlic and later scrub my head with a wet washcloth, I can smell the garlic on the washcloth.

Sweat doesn’t smell. Bacteria strains common in Asia don’t produce stinky compounds.

As a German, I want to add that on German trains, "in the summer" implicitly means "without working air conditioning" ;).

(Sort-of-jokingly. On ICEs, you're most likely to actually freeze body parts off due to the harsh AC. On local trains, you'll dehydrate due to excessive sweating. There is no middle ground.)

That's true. It was the 1970s when we were pressuring the stepfather.

About 1/3 of Germans still don't bathe every day. 1/6 of the French don't bathe every day.

To this day I don't bathe or shower everyday (maybe once a week, or two weeks?). I can't understand this American obsession with running away from your own real self. Why all this intollerance of being and smelling like a human being?

This isn't rocket science. Bad odors are offensive. If you stepped in dog shit, you'd (hopefully) clean you shoe and wouldn't get on a soap box about "running away from the true natural smells of nature" or some other nonsense.

Meh! It's just shit homie! I'm surrounded by it all day every day (no I don't clean shit off my shoes either). "Bad" odors are entirely subjective. Soap box? Last I checked this is an internet forum for seemingly highly sensitive people.

That's gross

Maybe? Gross is not a concept I was raised with. I also raise goats and am often told I smell like a buck in rut (because I do, as I'm always around them). Was always confused after I moved to the US what all the "ewwww!" screaming from my peers was about. What is hoped to be achieved by expressing something like that I wondered? Putting a person in the "other", or "not good enough", "not clean enough", "not wealthy enough" category? Bizarre anti-social behavior in my opinion.

Having dog shit on your shoes is gross. Smelling like a goat is also gross.

Some cultural asymmetries have swung the other way since. For example:

    41. "At the Folies Bergers or the Casino de Paris, even the usher girls demand tips! What a racket!"

Imagine a US person going abroad and being upset about tipping expectations today.

> the text is amazingly blunt and honest

It would likely have been written to be comprehensible to people with a fairly low reading level.

Why? The US literacy rate in the 1940s was 97.1%, and the US military had special programs to teach the illiterate to read. During WW2, 95% of illiterate recruits achieved minimum literacy within two months through the special training units developed for that purpose.

I know it’s easy for some people to think of a trigger puller as a dumb grunt - even more so one who served 80 years ago, but it’s not accurate or fair.

[0] https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp [1] https://library.syr.edu/digital/guides/s/soldiers_lit.htm

Literacy at what level?

From your first source: "In 1940, more than half of the U.S. population had completed no more than an eighth grade education." The manual had to be written at 8th grade level (at most) in order to be easily understood by more than 50% of the army.

I didn’t mean it as a value judgement; it’s clearly written to be very comprehensible. That’s a good thing!

Which makes it all the more impressive that it's quoting Tacitus and such like. There's an important distinction between reading level and intelligence, and I think we conflate the two in modern writing. Simple language doesn't need to be simplistic.

> Which makes it all the more impressive that it's quoting Tacitus and such like.

There's a common trope about "8th-grade" education in the US, and a fairly common response to it, e.g., https://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/p_test/1895_Eightgr_test.h....

There are, of course, reasons for the differences that aren't merely reactionary "people are dumb now" or "technology FTW!!1!" I suspect some of the quoting of Tacitus is due to a more classical emphasis, even in early education (see, for example, the McGuffey Readers[1]), where Latin and Greek were more widely studied, and their authors more integrated into the grade-level curriculum. I didn't read Herodotus or Tacitus until college (a classics course) and was pleasantly surprised by how readable and accessible they were.

[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14640 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGuffey_Readers

Well yes, but you also use that fact to be blunt and dishonest, like saying "Yep, the french don't wash. Guess they're just uncultured. They're still our allies, get used to it!"

I think more writers, especially technical writers, should am for this type of writing.

I like simple.

The DoD produces documents that are either

a) incredibly clear and straightforward, or

b) completely impenetrable (esp. anything with a diagram)

There is no middle ground. Seriously though, the Army's writing manual is top-notch and most high schools would be better for spending a month or three teaching from it.

Perhaps also to enable the French to read and understand it? You wouldn’t want them just reading the gripes (which are short and simple) and then not reading the responses.

There's also an excerpt from the NYT in there, number 33.

People weren't as fragile and sensitive then. It was better in that way.

Except that it's actual nonsense. Not long after WW2 the congress tried to ban comic books for spoiling the youth,just couple decades later people were holding public protests against the Simpsons, and the first TV show to mention the word "period" was met with similar level of protests as if that's something dirty and unspeakable.

No, it's the exact opposite - "back then" people were far more fragile and sensitive and doing or saying the wrong kind of thing could have serious consequences on your life.

Those are examples of a morally conservative society, in which a Judeo-Christian value system was in place, and when there was a stronger emphasis on conformity. I guess the sensitivity was in breaking those rules. In those times too, however, children were taught "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me".

Now, everyone is comfortable with talk of sex and biological realities...but a book critical of transgenderism is literally called "violence": https://www.rt.com/usa/529308-american-booksellers-associati....

I guess critics of such topics are today's Juvenile Delinquents. /s

You are both right, in some ways we have become less bashful about certain aspects of life, but also society today is a bit more particular about some things. It is no longer enough to disagree with someone, you must destroy their will to continue.

Imagine the first one being written today:

*We came to Europe twice in twenty-fee years to save the French*

We didn't come to Europe to save the French, either in 1917 or in 1944. We didn't come to Europe to do anyone any favors. (...) In this war, France fell in June of 1940, We didn't invade Europe until June of 1944. We didn't even think of "saving the French" through military action until after Pearl Harbor -- after the Germans declared war on us.

This would not even pass the lowest paid PR lackey at the DoD in 2021.

Yeah I kept thinking you'd never get away with talking that way now.

Number 48. seems related, both about cleanliness and being blunt. I was glancing through the text and I was very surprised when I found it.

> "I'd like the French a lot better if they were cleaner."

> That's perfectly understandable.

Also, page 35:

> The French haven’t had paint for a long time.

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