Word: rude
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...companies communicate. "I'm seen as terribly abrupt and abrasive," says Nevin. "If you're very direct, you're admired in American culture. The Japanese culture is much more subtle. I can never get them to tell me what they actually mean, and they may think I'm rude and crass. But both sides are only behaving in ways familiar to their own cultures...
...only to be promptly disabused of that notion. Japanese managers are ironhanded disciplinarians who believe that great players are made, not born, and they try to reshape the foreign players into the Japanese mold. The Americans, intense individualists that they are, rebel. The Japanese conclude that the Americans are rude, lazy, and worse, lacking in the sacrosanct wa, the sense of team spirit that obliges the Japanese to subordinate everything else in life to the interest of the team...
Under the circumstances, the man can hardly be adjudged "rude" for having courteously refused to execute what amounts to a command, no matter what inflection Taggart's friend may have used in uttering it. No one can say how the man might have reacted to a different approach. But the likelihood of his punching the button could only have increased, had the friend remembered her manners and said, "Could you press 13 for me please?" Marvin Hightower...
...unlucky floor, Karen's embarrassment changed to anger. "How rude! I should have said, 'Would you push the button for me if I was Black...
...convinced. "Well, what about women making coffee for a coworker? You could say a woman was just being rude if she refuses, but she has a point to make...