The British problem is not politeness. It is that we have built an entire second language on top of English, in which the actual meaning sits somewhere underneath the words, and we expect everybody to be fluent in it.
Then you move somewhere that has no reason to be fluent in it, and you discover how much work you were making other people do.
My old team kept a translation guide
Not a written one, but it may as well have been. The version I eventually heard back was roughly this: when Iain says “interesting”, he means bin it, or burn it with fire, why on earth would you do it this way.
Which is completely accurate, and it is the most useful piece of feedback I have had about how I communicate. Because look at what was actually happening. I thought I was being kind. I was in fact making a group of people do unpaid interpretation work every time I opened my mouth, and the ones who got it wrong were then surprised later when the thing they had built got binned.
The hedge was not softening the blow. It was postponing it and adding a puzzle.
My current team need a much smaller guide. I would like to claim that as growth. It is mostly just eight years of being in rooms where the hedge does not land.
No is a complete sentence
This is the single biggest change and it took me an embarrassingly long time.
Not “no, because”, not “I’m not sure that”, not “could we maybe look at”. Just no, and then stopping. The first few times it felt aggressive to the point of rudeness. It is not. Nobody at the other end of it experiences it as rude, which was the information I was missing for about a year.
What I have not become is blunt. I am still an introvert underneath all this, and there is a level of Dutch directness I can admire without ever getting near. I have moved perhaps a third of the way and then stopped, which feels about right.
The grammar made me a better listener, by accident
Here is the thing nobody warns you about. In Dutch a good deal of the negation turns up at the end of the sentence. You cannot tell from the first half whether you are being agreed with or refused. You have to wait for the whole thing.
So you wait. And having spent years waiting for the end of Dutch sentences, I now wait for the end of English ones too, which has quietly made me better at listening than any amount of deliberate effort ever did. I did not set out to acquire the habit. The word order imposed it.
Shops are the easy version
People in shops here are very direct, and it took me a while to stop reading it as rudeness. It is not rudeness. It is somebody telling you the thing you need to know, in the fewest words, and then getting on with their day.
Once you stop expecting the padding, the absence of padding stops registering as hostility. The British version is friendlier in tone and worse at conveying information, and I could not now tell you which I would rather be served by.
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