"Not Bothered"

Today in class we were talking about language and my group did "equivocal language" and we learned about how language has a huge impact on what we think people are saying and what they are actually saying. Something came to mind that I shared with the class:

When I was on my mission in England, even though we all spoke English, they said some things that were a bit confusing sometimes. The example I shard today is that we would knock on people's doors share a quick intro and then ask if we could come in and share more and sometimes people would look at us and say "I'm not bothered" I took that as meaning they weren't bothered about us coming into their house and sharing this message... well to them they were saying that they didn't care and they weren't bothered about the message that we had to share. It was something that I had to learn to get past.

Another time was when I was talking to someone and they were sharing something with me. For instance this guy was telling us how the current snowstorm (which was weak by Idaho/Utah standards) was the biggest England had seen in 10 years and was stopping everything dead in it's tracks and I would say, "Are you serious?". In America most people would respond with a "Yeah, I'm serious" but in England their response would be "No." To this day it still confuses me, but I just went with it.


Just interesting how even within the same language we miscommunicate things.