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Comment by vonzepp | Hacker News Reader

Accepting anything offered to you on the first offer is a bit rude. Basically, you are a guest of someone and shouldn't be a burden on them. They have to prove to you that you are not a burden, and then once that is clear you don't feel bad being served. Then your tea comes with cake, ham sandwiches and biscuit which is beyond the scope of the initial drink you were offered.

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very culturally dependent. In Germany, the first offer is the offer. If you refuse it, there will not be a second one; and making a second, third offer, in turn, would be rude in Germany, as it is pestering and assumes I'm lying with the first answer or I don't know what I want. How dare you assume this? :D

The English always think the Germans terribly rude. In turn, Germans find these English (also Irish, I guess) conventions of running around things fifteen times for ritual terribly exhausting, a complete waste of time and honestly, just an outright lie.

Take email rules. Germans ridicule this "Hi, how are you, how's the family?" loop before the email (or phone call, or meeting) comes to "I need this from you." A German mail is "Hi, I need this. Thanks." That is not rude at all; the contrary, you did not force your family on me and didn't pretend to care about things that you do NOT care about, and you didn't impose on me with private things from strangers that I do not care about. (in the English mail, signified by the fact that there are no actual answers. "Fine!" .... Great, that was useless and just signaled openly that we really do not care and the question was, in fact, a lie.)

if by 'lie' you mean part of the culturally specific social ritual which is an essential glue knitting disparate people together, then yes, it's a lie.

we lie all the time to knit people together, yes, of course. The key is in the "culturally specific" part. What kinds of lies are coded as rude and what kinds of lies are coded as glue? This differs, which was all I'm saying. I don't want to take the ritual from the English; I just want to keep them from making it universal (the English are very good at making whatever they do universal around the globe. ahem)

This isn't just different between cultures, it's different between status positions, scenes, relationship levels. If someone I'm just getting to know asks me for lunch and I don't feel like it, I'll say "I'd love to, I can't" if I do want to keep making a relationship with that person. If someone's an old friend, I'll say, "I don't want to", knowing that our friendship won't be hurt by that.

It's not a lie. Often the "how are you" is answered with "not bad", i.e. nothing much to say or don't want to talk about it, but sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it turns into a conversation about how life is going, or the problems you're having, or what you're looking forward to at the weekend or on your holiday. Or maybe just some idle chat about how hot it's been. Not only is this inevitably more fun than whatever the meeting was supposed to be about, it allows you to become closer with your colleagues.

It's basically just giving some room for that social interaction, which may or may not be used.

I'd argue that's only really the case face to face but very rarely by email

though it's not giving room in general; if it actually does depends on whether, in this context, it MAY be used or not, which the question itself doesn't communicate. This makes it a hornet's nest to actually use it. A purely ritual "how are you" met with actual emotional expression might make the situation quite awkward.

Thus, there are deeper contextual frames you need to understand in order to know if that "how are you" actually means "please, open up" or it it only means "I'm just checkmarking politeness in this convo before I tell you to stay 3 hours longer today".

I'm neither english or german, but I do prefer this german approach of making single offers to visitors and being direct in work emails. Being direct doesn't have to mean bossy or rude, it just means getting to the point.

https://youtu.be/_ZzLsaP-5po

maybe I should move to germany :)

I sometimes meet foreigners who have been to Poland and learned a few phrases from the locals. Usually "How are you" is among them only because they have specifically requested this to be translated, but I've never heard this being used as a greeting in my entire life.

I remember an implicit rule in India that politeness comes in 3 waves, 1st is always ignored, 2nd too, only when you mention something a 3rd time then you can be honest and serious.

Yeah a good break down, and despite its size, Ireland has quite a variation depending on your county. As with everything trivial we'll fight you about it.

For a really good look at tea drinking read Strumpet City, apart from it being an amazing novel, has the many ways they brewed and drank tea at the turn of the century.

Irish Black tea tends to be different than English Black tea, apart from being superior of course, we source the leaves from different locations, something something due to rationing during WWII...

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