28 June

This one seems a no-brainer. But both the Indians and Chinese for example find our use of so many pleases and thank you’s strange, even rude. It’s easy to confuse favours and obligations, please and thank you are about favours, whereas we use them indiscriminately to cover obligations too. We might say to a child ‘please clean your room’, and ‘thank you’ if they do. That’s a mistake, that’s an obligation they have, not a favour they owe us. It seems a small thing but if you unpick it a bit, by confusing favours and obligations we mess up many different parts of our lives. We’re weak on obligations, and we turn favours into obligations and obligations into favours. It confuses children in particular, we load their obligations with the emotional baggage of favours, and vice versa.