Reply #11: I had a problem many years ago.

[Igel]

I was teaching Russian, and the textbook used the word "shit'". It's the Russian word for "to sew", and in most Americans' pronunciation it just sounds like "shit". I had to belabor the point that the word meant "sew", not "crap".

Some of my students were offended at the word, and I had to dwell on the point that when Russians say "shit'" the meaning 'feces' is not occurring to them. When they say "vyshit" they simply mean "embroidered", not "crapified". Russians do not speak Russian while monitoring what Americans might think their speech stream sounds like to monolingual Americans any more than Americans, speaking English, ponder what a monolingual Russian would "hear" them saying at times. Both focus on content, not form; form is primarily a way of conveying content, in most settings.

I told them that when somebody from another culture does something, or a person speaking another language says something, the key is to try to understand, first and foremost, what that other person means. That they had to put aside their petty, ethnocentric ideas, be ever so slightly humble, and seek to understand before judging, esp. when the person's audience is people from his/her own culture. I kept telling my students that they were not *that* important to the average Russian, the universe did not revolve around them any more than it did around their Russian peers. If the person is trying to offend you, be offended; if the person is not, don't be an ass.

That greatly offended some students. It rather made me happy. I managed to say two true things that offended them instead of just one. The first was fairly trivial; the second was rather important. It was a class worth its 50 minutes.