Hat Tip: Arasan Aruliah
Top Posts
- Behavioral Economics Reading List
- Why Does the Fastest Swimmer Anchor a Relay?
- How To Open A Bag of Charcoal
- Planet Money is Running a Beauty Contest Experiment
- The Peacock's Tail
- Mark Twain on Plagiarism
- Left, Right, Then Left Again
- Jeff's Intermediate Micro Course
- Pricing Bareback
- Three Game Theorists Walk Into A (Common Value) Bar
Tags
art
art of office politics
banana seeds
blog
books
boston
california
chicago
coffee
computers
crime
current events
decision-making
economics
education
evolution
family
financial crisis
food and wine
friends
funny
game theory
incentives
iPhone
kludge
language
law
marriage
maths
movies
music
obama
politics
psychology
publishing
sandeep has bad taste
sanitation
sport
statistics
suicide
teaching
terrorism
the web
tomatoes
travel
TV
vapor mill
war
winter
writing
Subscribe via RSS
Jeff’s Twitter Feed
- re-upping this: cheaptalk.org/2011/09/21/can… 6 months ago
- Today the Supreme Court ruled that partisan gerrymandering is not something that the judicial system can regulate.… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 6 months ago
- “We are all just prisoners here of our own device” used to be a clever turn of phrase using a subtle form of the ve… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 1 year ago
- Wait, then how'd they get the toothpaste in there in the first place? 1 year ago
- I love you https://t.co/3Rkyir2WMU 1 year ago
3 comments
Comments feed for this article
February 22, 2013 at 2:56 pm
rani
The problem with these guides is that they always focus on what people say when they don’t like something or someone. (The “That’s not bad” rubric is a counter-example, but then it’s hard to tell the difference from “quite good”). But surely even Brits do have nice things to say about some things from time to time. So what do they say when they actually like something? For example, what would a Brit say if he actually wants to admit it’s his fault?
February 22, 2013 at 3:51 pm
Sandeep Baliga
If the someone sometimes makes understatements and sometimes says the reverse of what they really mean, then some things are impossible to communicate. If people always said the opposiite, saying “it’s entirely your fault” means “it’s all my fault”. If it is an undersatement, it means “I think the situation is your fault to the extent that I am actually willing to say this”. I guess the latter interpretation is correct in this example. So, I can’t think of a way to convey “it is my fault entirely” in a sincere manner in British.
February 24, 2013 at 2:36 pm
Osama Rahman
Have a look at “Mandarin 1:- An introduction to Civil Service Jargon”, lower left at http://www.civilservant.org.uk/index2.shtml