Comments by "Lynott Parris" (@DenUitvreter) on "American Reacts to Habits an American Picked up After living in Germany" video.

I don't think so. It's more about egalitarianism vs classism. Upper classes invent complicated communication to show their class and identify the people who weren't raised with the complicated rules and sensitivities so they can exclude them from their social circles. So in France and Britain you'r often in minefield of things you can't say. In more egalitarian societies the lower classes have made the rules of communication too, and they are not complicated because you can't be polite and beat around the bush when you're working in factories or offloading ships, that's dangererous. Germany is not very classist, but it is hierarchical. The boss is in every way a boss, and that limits the directness which trickles down to other social interaction. I'm Dutch, the Germans come across as not very direct but I am at the extreme of course. And I never had many misunderstandings or faux pas I can think of either.
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@IronFreee I should have pointed out that the social conventions in this have developped over centuries. Is communciation shaped by the upper class or more by the working classes. The complexity of indirectness will easily catch out the socially ascended, because the 'higher' born aren't raised with it that much.
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@IronFreee They are not the same things but they overlap. Not being direct but having to read between the lines, taking your time to be polite, it simply is far less in the working classes traditionally and especially in the work that defines their class, because there it's not working. It's dangerous. The upper class traditionally has all the time for it and uses it to distinct between peers and the one beneath them, who don't master it as well. It's difficult, reading between the lines and handling all the rules of politeness is a skill, somthing some are raised with and many not. So which one of both shaped the general customs in communication?
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I think stone cools down slowly, and heats up slowly. There is a kind of base temperature to the house that only changes over seasons. A house that has been unoccupied and unheated for a while can be very cold, nothting like a house that hasn't been heated for a day or a vacation. So it doesn't really matter that much to blow cold air in, maybe that's very different with wooden houses. Many houses are designed to have opposing windows. This is for light, but is also excellent to have the fresh air blow through front to back.
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