To your point, which is a fair one, there are varying levels of these nuances.x9200 wrote:If you are talking about "hate" then I think it is pretty clear it is just a speech hyperbole.JR8 wrote:SGns, and in fact any non-Brits here are in a mine-field, as they fail to see and navigate the very nuanced linguistic minefield! There is much nuance based on word-play in English and 'Jonny-Foreigner' usually totally misses it, or worse takes it 180 degrees the wrong way, right up the jacksie, then they stick it on you!!
For more sophisticated sarcasm and nuances it's probably but partly true, especially in the places like this where the whole non-verbal part of communication is missing. I see often more than one possibility to chose from and typically deciding it was not a sarcasm is more safe.
Yet another point is, that it take some language skills to respond to such speech and as I am not that well versed in English, again I often choose to react as it was just a plain straightforward message.
I remember before I first went overseas and I worked for an Australian company with a right-off-the-boat Australian team in NY, and I was the only American. They used some idioms that left me baffled but expected us to know. As it was around the time of Crocodile Dundee it was usually in good fun.
Years later working in Japan, one of my coworkers was a Liverpudlian, and the kind of foreigner who never learns the language or culture. She would throw out Cockney rhyming slang comments, as if I, or even worse, our Japanese coworkers, were supposed to know what the eff she was on about. Failing that and after she was done explaining herself, whatever comedic moment or cleverness was obviously lost. The Japanese would take it on face value, then learning it was supposed to be humor, would make their best efforts to laugh (while afterwards shaking their heads as if they were missing something); I would just wait out the painful moment.
That kind of thing is really a bit much to expect anyone is going to grasp.
Flash forward to just a few years ago, in the cinema watching The Incredibles, where the majority local audience were roaring at basically barely- or un-funny things, fillers and other things that are not really meant to be laughed at. When some clever, obscure reference would come up, and there were a few in that movie, I was the only one, wife and non-American Western audience members included, laughing.