You Can Fool Some of the
People . . .
By LARRY ROMANOFF – August 30, 2020
This
article is merely a curiosity dealing with language and culture but may be of
interest to a few readers, and perhaps of occasional assistance in assessing
comments made by others. My observations were prompted by my notice of a few
persons commenting here who pretend to be something (or someone) they are not,
in particular one person masquerading as a Chinese. It isn't common, but
perhaps interesting. Let's look at a few cultural differences and see where
this takes us.
Canadians
and Americans particularly, in spite of their "melting pots" of
peoples and cultures, generally display little to no understanding of other
cultures and tend to interpret differences through ideological lenses and their
lack of a culture, usually resulting in misunderstanding or misinterpreting
comments or points of view, often arriving at conclusions that are wrong.
In your face
As
one example, a high-ranking American politician said recently that the Chinese
need to rid themselves of what she termed their "shyness and lack of
confidence". It was beyond the limits of her understanding to realise that
what she was seeing was neither shyness nor a lack of confidence, but modesty,
one of the more charming characteristics of typical Chinese and Asians
generally. American women as a class are not modest, are typically neither
"shy" nor lacking "confidence" and tend to have a bolder
"in your face" attitude compared to Asian women.
