FEEL MY SUBTLETY!

So, one thing that I find pretty interesting about German and Germans has to do with subtlety.  I'm more of a person who says things in a roundabout way in the interest of being polite.  I do a lot of dancing around the point.  In my experience, though, most Germans I know are very direct.  They don't shit around, man.  And I think that's not necessarily always due to personality. The language itself and the phrases that people commonly use, well, don't really jive in English.  I'm probably not explaining this very well, so here's an example.

If you call someone in German and they are unavailable, the person who answers will often tell you "Sie hat keine Zeit."  This translates to "She doesn't have time."  You could throw the word "leider" in there (as in, "Sie hat leider keine Zeit")  which means "unfortunately."  But I think that if I called someone up and their mom or whoever said "She doesn't have time," I'd consider that to be pretty brusque.  As in, "She doesn't have time for you."  I mean, in the US we'd usually say something like "She can't come to the phone" or "She's unavailable," and maybe the slightly more curt "She's busy."  These phrases are a bit more oblique and tend to imply that she is too busy to come to the phone at all, it's not just you she doesn't have time for.  But "Sie hat keine Zeit" is perfectly fine in German.  The other day I was offered a coffee and I declined, saying "I think I'm good, thanks."  And the person said, "That's such an American thing to say."  Now it makes sense...instead of just saying "no," I used implications of uncertainty and contentment to decline the coffee.

Anyway, I'm going to the sold-out Clueso concert on Tuesday WEEEEEE