You like rainy days. But when someone beside you sighs and says, “Ugh, not rain again,” you nod politely: “Yeah, why is it always raining lately?” A harmless white lie, a thread in the quiet fabric of adult small talk. No need to dive into your poetic attachment to grey skies.

But manners, like humor, are deeply cultural. And while most adults learn to be “polite,” what counts as polite varies wildly across borders.

There’s a well-worn joke: A British boss tells a German employee, “This proposal is excellent. Just a few small changes and it’ll be perfect.” The Brit hears: We’ll never use this. The German hears: Great! Let’s make it even better! Same sentence, entirely different realities.

I still remember my first intercultural training in Germany. The instructor—British, living in Germany for decades—confessed she still hadn’t adjusted to how blunt Germans are.

And yes, they are blunt. Let me give you a few examples.

Scene One.
A group of us were out for a walk after lunch. One colleague’s black tights had a small hole. I noticed it and debated whether to whisper to her later. But before I could, another colleague spotted it and immediately said—loudly, in front of everyone—“You’ve got a hole in your tights.”
The woman shrugged: “Does that bother you?”
“No, not at all.”
And that was it.
A very German exchange.
Another time, I wore a sweater to the office with the size tag still attached. A Greek colleague quietly helped me remove it with a smile. On another occasion, a Spanish friend pulled me aside to tell me I had left the sticker on the sole of my new shoes. Same situation, different choreography.

Scene Two.
I was having coffee with a friend and her neighbor. Midway through the chat, the neighbor casually mentioned they were moving to Switzerland. My friend blinked in surprise, then frowned. “If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have invested so much time building this friendship, or arranging playdates...