] Suppose you lived in a world where there were two kinds
] of truth: a public truth, which everyone professed but
] nobody really believed, and a private truth, representing
] your real inner convictions which could never be said
] openly for fear of giving offense.
]
] .
]
] Put crudely like this, such a world could seem an
] Orwellian nightmare, recalling the last years of Soviet
] Russia with its dull conformity to discredited beliefs.
] But in practice, social and linguistic constructions of
] this kind are universal. Mostly, in our own societies, we
] take them for granted and don't question them. What we
] find differing between cultures, and even between social
] levels of a culture, is the degree of formality and
] importance given to these conventions.
]
] .
]
] At one extreme, in Japanese culture, the words tatamae
] and honne - often translated as appearance and reality -
] distinguish precisely two such "truths," the one formal
] and public, the other unspoken and private. That such a
] distinction can actually be labeled tells us much about
] the formality of Japanese life and the corresponding
] difficulty for outsiders in reading what linguists call
] the "register" - the meaningful context for an utterance
] - and therefore in understanding what is really being
] said. Many a Western business executive must have left a
] meeting sure of a positive outcome, on the basis of the
] Japanese assurance "Zensho shimasu" (I will do my best).
] Unfortunately this phrase is merely a polite way of
] saying no.
]
] .