Neighbour has taken in our cat - how would you react?

[vero]

Install a sprinkler for the aromatic plants. You can get little solar battery powered ones.

[SuePJ]

@Arcalia

I would go myself rather than send your wife who might not be so diplomatic.

Interesting perspective. My OH always sends me (a) I understand better (b) in our part of France which is still very chauvinistic a woman is less threatening. When I want “the heavies” involved, or it’s the agricultural brico store, I send him. Also, how do you know whether “your wife” is not so diplomatic.

[Arcalia]

Well because the writer of the message said, his wife was ‘angry’ .

[vero]

I wonder if part of the problem with your neighbour is communication: how good your French is may be one thing, but British woolliness could be another. We don’t get offended or threatened (as anglosaxons seem to) by straight talking, have you perhaps been talking to your neighbour as you might to a British person?

Because if so they won’t have got the message. You have to be blunt and even what in the UK might be considered rude: we think that’s normal communication and it doesn’t make us dislike etc the person who talks to us like that, we think it is honest and straightforward.

We actually often think many English-speakers are terrible hypocrites because they don’t speak their minds. (See also smiling all the time at people you don’t know, we think it’s fake).

Anyway I’m sorry if you found what I wrote alarming threatening or unsympathetic, it wasn’t intentionally so.

[vero]

@Arcalia

Well because the writer of the message said, his wife was ‘angry’ .

I think there’s a confusion here, the only person saying they might be angry was me. I’m not a wife and I don’t think Bee necessarily has one either. There’s no angry wife involved here

[Porridge]

@vero

@Arcalia

Well because the writer of the message said, his wife was ‘angry’ .

I think there’s a confusion here, the only person saying they might be angry was me. I’m not a wife and I don’t think Bee necessarily has one either. There’s no angry wife involved here

Simple word association, I imagine.

[Arcalia]

I wasn’t responding to your message but to someone posting about their cat being enticed into someone else’s house. I guess that’s where the confusion was. My response clearly doesn’t fit your post. Probably my error, big fingers!!

[vero]

@Porridge

Simple word association, I imagine.

Depends whose wife

[vero]

@anon91526832

So, we can just as easily find a French person who is a direct communicator (or blunt as you put it,) and another who is rather indirect and subtle, one who is aggressive and another passive, and yet another assertive, etc. etc

Whatever. I’m telling you about how my culture works.

I do have some notion of how things are in the UK (let’s reduce English speakers to that subgroup) thanks to having been educated mainly in the UK.

I think you may find there are certain common cultural norms shared by speakers of English wherever they may come from which are not shared by speakers of eg French, or Arabic, or German, who may operate by different social conventions and unwritten/unspoken social rules.

Do you work in France? Where are you from? Which other languages do you speak?

Edited to say don’t feel you have to answer those questions, it’s none of my business.

Edited again, to say I suspect you may be from the US and thus I fear even UK norms of indirectness may appear a touch robust.

[toryroo]

I agree on difference of bluntness between English speaking countries. As an Aussie I often feel I may have been too blunt amongst POM’s!

[vero]

@toryroo Oh goodness I sympathise, my daughter currently working in London is shocked at the levels of snowflakery and general feebleness she has to deal with. I’d be tempted to go and open a grip shop. I do think there’s a generational element but it is very striking when you compare either side of the channel.

[KarenLot]

snowflakery and general feebleness. Amen to that. Add in political correctness and it’s perfect.

[JohnH]

@vero

I wonder if part of the problem with your neighbour is communication: how good your French is may be one thing, but British woolliness could be another. We don’t get offended or threatened (as anglosaxons seem to) by straight talking, have you perhaps been talking to your neighbour as you might to a British person?

This is so true. We had a new person join us in the office and I couldn’t work out why she rubbed me up the wrong way. It took me a while to realise that she’d lived so long in France that she’d adopted that French directness but, with an English accent, it felt rude. I would not have even noticed if she had been French.