Daniel sent us this one — he grew up in Ireland, moved to Israel about ten years ago, and noticed something that took him a while to even name. In Ireland, the social default is congeniality, fitting in, not creating friction. In Israel, people will argue with you at a bar like they're settling a blood feud, and nobody thinks twice about it. The specific thing he's asking is: what do you call this quality — the openness of people to be at odds with one another? And where do different countries fall on that spectrum? It's a good question, because this is one of those things you feel immediately when you move between cultures but struggle to articulate.
There's actually a robust framework for exactly this. Erin Meyer, who teaches cross-cultural management at INSEAD, wrote a book called The Culture Map, and one of her eight scales is what she calls "confrontation" — the spectrum from confrontation-avoidant to confrontation-seeking cultures. She maps it across dozens of countries, and her research aligns almost perfectly with what the prompt is describing. Israel sits at the extreme confrontation-seeking end of her scale. Right at the edge.
Israel is basically the world capital of arguing with strangers.
Meyer's data places Israel as the most confrontational culture she measured. France is also high on the scale, as is Russia, as is the Netherlands. On the opposite end, you find Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, Ghana — cultures where open disagreement, especially in group settings, is seen as a serious breach of harmony. And Ireland, while she doesn't put it at the extreme pole, lands squarely in the avoidance camp. It's what she'd call an emotionally expressive but confrontation-avoidant culture.
Which is an interesting combination. Expressive but avoidant. So you're warm, you're chatty, you're emotionally available — right up until there's a genuine point of tension, and then everyone pivots to weather and traffic.
That's the nuance a lot of people miss. They conflate emotional expressiveness with confrontational directness, but Meyer's framework separates them. You can be a culture that laughs loudly, interrupts, touches, uses expansive gestures — and still have a deep norm against open disagreement. Ireland is emotionally expressive on one axis but confrontation-avoidant on the other. Israel is both emotionally expressive and extremely confrontation-seeking. Japan is emotionally reserved and confrontation-avoidant. And then you get interesting cases like Germany or the Netherlands — emotionally reserved but perfectly comfortable with direct disagreement.
You can be a cold arguer or a warm arguer. And Daniel's experience tracks this — he's describing the whiplash of moving from a warm peacekeeping culture to a warm arguing culture. The warmth is familiar, but suddenly there's no editing function on disagreement.
There's a term in Hebrew that captures part of this: dugri speech. It comes from Arabic — dugri means "straight" or "direct." Israeli sociologist Tamar Katriel wrote a whole book about it. Dugri speech is this cultural mode where you say what you mean without softening, without hedging, and the social understanding is that this is a form of respect. If I give you the unvarnished truth, I'm treating you as an equal. If I soften it, I'm patronizing you.
Which is almost the exact inverse of the Irish model, where softening is the respect.
In Irish communication culture, you demonstrate respect by not imposing your disagreement on someone. You preserve their comfort. In Israeli dugri culture, you demonstrate respect by not insulting their intelligence with polite fictions. Same value — respect — expressed through completely opposite behaviors.
Both sides can read the other as rude.
That's the tragedy of cross-cultural communication. The Israeli reads the Irish person as evasive, maybe even dishonest. The Irish person reads the Israeli as aggressive, maybe even hostile. Neither is correct. They're both operating within coherent moral frameworks that just happen to be mirror images.
I remember reading something about how dugri speech developed. It wasn't just organic — there was an ideological component.
Yeah, Katriel traces it to the early Zionist pioneers. There was a deliberate rejection of what they saw as diasporic Jewish indirectness — the shtetl Jew who had to navigate hostile environments by being deferential, by reading the room, by not making waves. The sabra, the native-born Israeli, was supposed to be the opposite: direct, blunt, unafraid. Dugri speech was almost a nation-building project.
The national character was engineered to some degree. "We will be the people who say the thing.
You can see the residue of that engineering in everything from Israeli business culture to Israeli academia to Israeli family dinners. There's a famous anecdote in Meyer's book about an Israeli executive who told her, "If I'm not arguing with you, it means I don't respect you enough to engage with your ideas.
Which would sound like a threat in Dublin. Whereas in Tel Aviv, it's almost a compliment. "Your ideas are worth fighting about.
Let's name the quality. The prompt asks what you'd call this. I think Meyer's "confrontation" scale works, but it's slightly misleading because confrontation in English carries a negative charge. You could call it "disagreement tolerance" or "friction comfort." Maybe "dissonance openness" — the degree to which a culture accepts that people in a room can hold incompatible views and express them without the social fabric tearing.
Social scientists sometimes use the term "conflict tolerance," but I prefer your formulation. "Dissonance openness" captures something important — it's not just about whether you tolerate conflict, it's about whether you even perceive it as conflict in the first place. If you grow up in a dugri culture, two people vigorously disagreeing about politics over dinner isn't conflict. It's Tuesday.
The prompt mentions something specific that's worth sitting with. Daniel said he discovered old friends from Ireland were extremely anti-Israel — but only after he moved away and followed them on social media. In person, with him as a Jewish interlocutor, that opinion was hidden. And he finds that disingenuous.
I get why. There's a particular sting to realizing someone has been editing themselves around you. It retroactively poisons the interactions. You wonder: was our friendship real, or was I just being managed?
I want to push back a little, because I can also see the Irish side. If you hold a view you know would hurt your friend, and you value the friendship, and your cultural script says "don't create friction" — isn't withholding that view actually an act of care?
It depends on which ethical framework you're operating in. In the Irish framework, yes — you're protecting the relationship from unnecessary damage. In the Israeli framework, you're infantilizing your friend by assuming they can't handle your actual opinion. Both frameworks have internal coherence.
The problem is when one side doesn't know the editing is happening. The prompt's point isn't that the editing is wrong — it's that the editing is invisible, and that invisibility creates a kind of betrayal. If both parties agree "we're doing the politeness dance," there's no deception. The deception emerges when one party thinks they're having an authentic exchange and the other is performing congeniality.
Like being in a play where nobody told you there was a script, and you're the only one improvising. Which is a perfect metaphor for cross-cultural confusion generally.
Let's put some more countries on this spectrum. We've got Israel and France at the confrontation-seeking end. Ireland somewhere in the avoidance camp.
Meyer's data puts the Netherlands quite high on directness and confrontation — the Dutch are famous for it. Germany is high on directness but slightly more restrained on emotional expression. Russia is extremely direct and quite emotionally expressive in certain contexts. On the avoidance end, beyond Japan and Thailand, you've got much of East and Southeast Asia. China, Korea, Vietnam — all cultures where preserving face and avoiding open disagreement is deeply embedded.
Then there are the interesting middle cases.
The United States is a fascinating one. Americans think of themselves as direct, and by some measures they are. But Meyer's research shows Americans are more confrontation-avoidant than they like to believe. The American business culture has a very specific style — what she calls "three positives before a negative." You sandwich criticism between layers of praise. To a Dutch or Israeli person, this reads as confusing and slightly manipulative. To the American, it's just being polite.
The compliment sandwich. "Great job on the formatting. The core argument is incoherent and the data is wrong. Love the font choice though.
That's the one. And in a Dutch workplace, your manager just says "the core argument is incoherent and the data is wrong," and you say "okay, let me fix it," and nobody's feelings are hurt because nobody interprets direct criticism as a personal attack.
There's a British layer to this too, which is relevant because Ireland's politeness norms didn't emerge in a vacuum — they exist in relation to British norms, and also in distinction from them.
The British are masters of what you might call coded disagreement. Kate Fox wrote about this in Watching the English — the way a British person saying "that's an interesting idea" actually means "I think that's completely wrong but I'm not going to say so directly." And everyone understands the code. "Interesting" is basically a polite burial.
"That's one way of looking at it.
And the Irish have their own version of this — maybe even more elaborate, because there's the added layer of not wanting to be seen as taking oneself too seriously. The Irish social penalty for being "full of yourself" is severe. If you're too direct, too insistent on your own opinion, you risk being seen as having notions.
"Notions" — that's a very specifically Irish concept. Having ideas above your station, taking yourself too seriously, forgetting where you came from. The social enforcement mechanism is mockery, and it's extremely effective.
That creates a culture where strong opinions get softened into banter, or hidden entirely. Because the worst thing you can be in that context isn't wrong — it's self-important.
Which brings us back to Daniel's point about discovering his friends' real views on social media. If the norm is "don't be too earnest, don't be too insistent, don't create friction," then of course the strong opinions go underground. They don't disappear. They just migrate to spaces where the social cost is lower.
X, formerly Twitter, is the perfect venue for that. Low social cost, high distance, performative audience. You can say things there you'd never say across a pub table.
The politeness norm doesn't actually eliminate disagreement. It just relocates it. And the relocation creates a new problem: the person you're disagreeing about doesn't know you disagree until they stumble across it in a context where they're a topic, not a participant.
Which is much worse, emotionally, than having the argument in person. The dugri approach — have the fight at the table, settle it or don't, but at least you're both present — has a kind of integrity to it.
Provided both people want to be there. I think we should acknowledge the dark side of confrontation-seeking cultures too. It's not all authenticity and respect.
The Israeli model can be exhausting. It can tip into genuine aggression. It can silence people who aren't comfortable with that mode — and those people often end up being women, or minorities, or anyone who doesn't fit the dominant communication style. Meyer notes this in her work: the confrontation scale isn't about better or worse, it's about fit and consequences.
There's also the question of what happens when a confrontation culture meets a hierarchical culture. If you're a junior employee in a French company, you might be expected to debate ideas vigorously — but you're also navigating a steep power gradient. That's a complicated dance.
Meyer has a separate scale for hierarchy versus egalitarianism, so she'd map that as an interaction between two dimensions. France is high on confrontation but also relatively hierarchical. The Netherlands is high on confrontation and very egalitarian. So the Dutch junior employee can tell the CEO she's wrong, and it's fine. The French junior employee is supposed to debate but also supposed to know their place.
Let's talk about some other examples the prompt was curious about. Beyond Israel and Ireland, what are the really interesting cases?
I think one of the most instructive comparisons is Japan versus China. They're often lumped together as "indirect East Asian cultures," but the mechanisms are different. Japan's avoidance of confrontation is tied to concepts like wa — group harmony — and tatemae versus honne, the distinction between the public face and the private truth. China's is more about mianzi, face, and the Confucian emphasis on social order. The outcomes look similar from the outside — you don't openly disagree — but the underlying logic is distinct.
That distinction matters if you're actually trying to navigate those cultures.
It matters enormously. In Japan, the harmony is the point. Preserving wa is an end in itself. In China, face is more instrumental — it's about maintaining social capital and not damaging relationships that have practical value. So a Chinese businessperson might be indirect in a meeting but extremely direct in a one-on-one dinner, because the face calculus changes.
What about the Nordic countries?
Sweden is an interesting case. Swedes are often described as conflict-averse, and there's something called the "Swedish consensus" model — decisions are made through extensive discussion aimed at reaching agreement, not through adversarial debate. But they're also quite direct in certain contexts. It's a very particular flavor: consensus-seeking but not dishonest. They want actual agreement, not fake agreement.
They'll argue until they actually converge, rather than arguing for the sake of it or pretending to agree for the sake of peace.
It's a third way. And it's connected to something the Swedes call jantelagen — the Law of Jante — which is a cultural code that says you shouldn't think you're special or better than others. It's similar to the Irish "notions" concept. Both cultures have a tall poppy syndrome, a social pressure not to stand out or assert superiority.
Which produces a very different kind of indirectness than, say, Japanese harmony preservation. The Swedish version is "don't act like your opinion matters more than anyone else's." The Japanese version is "don't disrupt the group." The Irish version is something like "don't make this weird.
Don't make this weird is honestly a pretty good summary of Irish social norms.
It's the national motto. Put it on the euro.
I want to bring in another dimension here that I think the prompt is gesturing toward but doesn't name directly. There's a concept from political science and anthropology called "tightness versus looseness." Michele Gelfand at Stanford has done extensive research on this. Tight cultures have strong norms and low tolerance for deviance from those norms. Loose cultures have weaker norms and higher tolerance for deviance.
How does it correlate with the confrontation scale?
It's not a perfect overlap, but there's a relationship. Tight cultures — think Singapore, Japan, Pakistan — tend to be more confrontation-avoidant because deviation from social scripts is punished. But the mechanism is different. Tightness is about norm enforcement generally, not specifically about disagreement. So a culture could theoretically be tight and argumentative — if the norm being enforced is "you must argue.
Which sounds like certain academic subcultures. Or Israeli academia, where there's actually a tight norm around being confrontational. If you're too agreeable, you're violating expectations. People suspect you're not serious.
The tightness-looseness axis cuts across the confrontation axis. You can have tight-confrontational, tight-avoidant, loose-confrontational, loose-avoidant. Four quadrants again. And the prompt's experience is moving from a relatively tight-avoidant culture — Ireland, where there are strong norms about not creating friction — to a relatively tight-confrontational culture — Israel, where there are strong norms about being direct. Both are tight. Both have social scripts you're supposed to follow. But the scripts are opposites.
That's a really useful framing. Because it explains why both places can feel socially demanding, just in different ways. Ireland demands you manage other people's comfort. Israel demands you manage your own intellectual credibility. Neither is relaxed.
The loose-culture version of this would be somewhere like parts of urban Brazil, or certain Mediterranean cultures where norms are more flexible and you can be direct or indirect depending on context and mood, and nobody's keeping score too rigorously.
What about the Arab world? Because Israel's dugri culture exists in a regional context, and Arabic communication styles are relevant.
It's complicated and varies enormously across the Arab world, but there are some common threads. Many Arab cultures place a very high value on eloquence, on the aesthetic quality of speech. Directness can be seen as crude. There's an emphasis on what's called musayara — going along with, accommodating — which is a form of social grace. But there's also a tradition of passionate debate in certain contexts. The Arab world isn't one thing.
The dugri speech that Israeli culture celebrates actually has Arabic roots, as you mentioned. The word itself is Arabic. So there's a shared linguistic ancestor but a very different cultural expression.
Which is a nice reminder that language and culture aren't the same thing. Same word, borrowed into a different social context, can mean something completely different.
I want to circle back to something the prompt raises implicitly. There's a question about whether high-dissonance cultures are actually more honest, or just performatively honest. Because you can have a cultural script of "I'm just being direct" that becomes its own kind of performance.
That's a sharp point. Performative bluntness is absolutely a thing. The person who prides themselves on "telling it like it is" and uses that as a cover for being a jerk — every culture has that guy. But in confrontation-seeking cultures, that guy has cultural cover. He can say "what, I'm just being Israeli" or "I'm just being Dutch" and it's harder to push back.
The mirror image in avoidance cultures is the person who uses politeness as a weapon. The passive-aggressive master who never says anything directly hostile but somehow leaves you feeling eviscerated.
The British have elevated this to an art form. The letter of complaint that is so exquisitely polite that you don't realize you've been destroyed until you read it a third time.
"I write to express my very great disappointment" — which in British means "I am incandescent with rage and may pursue legal action.
In Israeli it would just be "this is unacceptable, fix it." Which is more efficient but also — and I think this matters — less fun.
The aesthetic dimension matters. Politeness codes are partly about social harmony, but they're also partly about style. There's a pleasure in executing the indirect communication well. It's a craft.
Just like there's a pleasure in executing a devastating direct argument well. Different aesthetic traditions.
What do we actually do with this? If someone is navigating between these cultures — like the prompt describes — is there a practical takeaway beyond "be aware that differences exist"?
Meyer's work suggests a few things. One is that you can learn to code-switch. It's not easy, and it can feel inauthentic at first, but people do it. The Israeli who learns to soften their delivery when working with British colleagues. The Irish person who learns that disagreeing openly in an Israeli meeting isn't rude — it's expected, and not doing it might actually harm your standing.
The meta-skill is reading the room correctly. Which room are you in?
That's harder than it sounds, because the cues are different. In a confrontation-avoidant culture, silence can mean disagreement. In a confrontation-seeking culture, silence might mean agreement or disengagement. If you misread the silence, you misread everything.
There's also the question of authenticity. The prompt seems to be wrestling with this — if you code-switch, are you being fake? And if you don't code-switch, are you being rude? Is there a version of cross-cultural communication that's both effective and true to yourself?
I think that's one of the deepest questions in intercultural communication, and I don't think there's a clean answer. My own view — and this is just me, not the research — is that authenticity isn't about using the same communication style everywhere. It's about being honest about your intentions. If you're genuinely trying to connect and understand, and you adapt your style to make that possible, that's not fake. That's translation.
Translation is a good metaphor. You're not changing the meaning. You're finding the idiom that carries the meaning in the target culture. And just like translation, you're going to lose something. The question is whether you're losing the thing that matters.
Let's go broader for a minute. Are there historical or economic factors that push cultures toward one end of this spectrum or the other?
Gelfand's tightness-looseness research finds a strong correlation with historical threat. Cultures that have faced high levels of ecological threat, territorial invasion, resource scarcity — they tend to develop tighter norms. The logic is that when survival is precarious, you need strict coordination, and deviation is dangerous. Cultures that have been relatively secure — geographically isolated, resource-rich — can afford to be looser.
Which would predict that Israel, with its particular history, would be tight in some dimensions. And it is.
Tightness doesn't specify the content of the norm. It just says norms will be strong. The content — whether the norm is "argue openly" or "preserve harmony" — comes from other sources: ideology, founding myths, religious traditions, historical accidents.
The founding myth piece is interesting. You mentioned the sabra ideal earlier. Israel had a very deliberate cultural project in its early decades: create a new kind of Jew. The dugri thing wasn't just organic — it was ideologically driven.
Ireland had its own nation-building project, but it produced different norms. The Irish cultural revival was about language, literature, Catholicism, a certain vision of rural virtue. It wasn't about directness. If anything, the colonial experience may have reinforced indirectness as a survival strategy — you don't tell the landlord what you really think.
Which is a pattern you see in a lot of post-colonial cultures. Indirectness as armor. You learn to say things in ways that can't be used against you.
That becomes intergenerational. The survival strategy outlasts the survival context and just becomes "how we are.
The prompt mentions growing up in a volatile home as possibly shaping his reaction to public arguments. That's a different layer — not cultural but personal. You can have a cultural norm and a personal history that interact in complicated ways.
If you grew up in an environment where arguments meant danger, and then you move to a culture where arguments are recreational, your nervous system is going to read those situations completely differently from someone who grew up in that culture. You're hearing threat where locals are hearing engagement.
It takes time to retrain that. Some people never fully do.
Which isn't a failure. It's just a fact about how deeply our early environments shape our threat detection systems.
We've got the cultural layer, the historical layer, the ideological layer, and the personal layer — all interacting. No wonder cross-cultural communication is hard.
No wonder it's so interesting. You're basically doing anthropology in real time, on yourself.
Let's talk about some edge cases that don't fit neatly on the spectrum. What about cultures where the confrontation norm varies dramatically by context? Like, you can argue about politics but not about family. Or you can argue with peers but not with elders.
That's most cultures, honestly. The confrontation scale is a useful abstraction, but the reality is always more textured. In many Mediterranean cultures, you can have screaming arguments about football or politics, but certain topics — religion, family honor, personal finances — are off-limits. The domain specificity matters enormously.
Gender plays a role too. In a lot of cultures, men are permitted or even expected to be confrontational in ways women are not.
That cuts both ways. In some confrontation-avoidant cultures, women are expected to be more indirect than men, doubling the constraint. In some confrontation-seeking cultures, women who adopt the dominant direct style get penalized for being "aggressive" while men get rewarded for being "assertive." Same behavior, different reaction.
The classic double bind. Be direct and you're difficult. Be indirect and you're weak.
Navigating that across cultures is exponentially harder, because you're dealing with both the host culture's gender norms and your own internalized ones.
Let's get concrete with some examples. If I'm an Irish manager leading a team that includes Israelis, Dutch, Japanese, and American colleagues, what am I supposed to do?
Erin Meyer would say the first step is just making the differences explicit. Talk about them. Say: "I come from a culture where direct disagreement can feel uncomfortable. Some of you come from cultures where it's expected. Let's agree on how we want to handle disagreement in this team." The -conversation solves a lot of problems before they start.
You negotiate a team culture rather than defaulting to anyone's national culture.
And you designate a "disagreement protocol." Some teams use a phrase like "let me challenge that" to signal that what follows is intellectual disagreement, not personal attack. It gives the avoidance-culture people a way to opt in, and it gives the confrontation-culture people a signal that their directness is welcome but within bounds.
That's surprisingly practical. I was expecting you to say "it's complicated and there's no solution.
It is complicated and there's no perfect solution. But there are partial solutions. Naming the dynamic is half the battle.
What about at the national level? Are there countries that are shifting on this spectrum? Is globalization pushing everyone toward some middle ground?
There's some evidence of convergence in business contexts, especially in multinational companies where English is the lingua franca and a kind of global corporate culture emerges. But the deep norms don't shift that quickly. The Japanese office of a multinational might adopt some Western meeting practices, but the underlying communication style — the hesitation, the indirectness, the concern for harmony — that persists.
Some cultures might actually be moving in the opposite direction. I wonder if the current political climate in some countries is making confrontation norms more extreme rather than less.
Polarization can absolutely amplify confrontation norms in cultures that already lean that way. If the public square becomes a shouting match, the private square often follows. And on the flip side, in avoidance cultures, polarization can drive opinions even further underground — people self-censor more aggressively because the stakes of saying the wrong thing feel higher.
Which is exactly the dynamic the prompt describes. The strong opinions don't disappear. They just go where the social cost is lower. And then you find them on X at two in the morning.
The distance between the public performance and the private truth grows wider. That's the thing about confrontation-avoidant cultures in the age of social media — the avoidance norm applies to face-to-face interaction, but online, where the social cost structure is different, the suppressed opinions come out. And they often come out hotter, because they've been suppressed.
The pressure cooker model of politeness. Works until it doesn't.
Where does that leave us? Is there an argument for one end of the spectrum being healthier than the other?
I don't think the research supports a simple answer. Each has strengths and pathologies. Confrontation-seeking cultures can be more innovative — disagreement surfaces problems faster, ideas get stress-tested. But they can also be exhausting and exclusionary. Confrontation-avoidant cultures can be more harmonious and inclusive of different communication styles. But they can also be stagnant and dishonest.
The prompt seems to land somewhere in the middle, emotionally. Missing the warmth of Irish congeniality, appreciating the honesty of Israeli directness, not fully at home in either.
Which is the expatriate condition in a nutshell. You're always a little bit between. You see both cultures more clearly than insiders do, but you also don't fully belong to either anymore.
That clarity is a gift, even if it's uncomfortable. Most people never see their own culture's communication norms as choices. They just seem like reality.
The fish doesn't know it's in water. The expat is the fish that got pulled out and thrown into a different tank. You spend the rest of your life aware of water.
Alright, let's try to give this quality a working name. The prompt asked what you'd call it. We've got Meyer's "confrontation," we've got "dissonance openness," we've got "conflict tolerance." I'm leaning toward "friction comfort" — the degree to which a culture is comfortable with interpersonal friction as a normal part of social life.
I like "friction comfort." It captures the experiential dimension. It's not about whether you seek conflict or avoid it — it's about whether friction registers as danger or as texture.
The prompt's journey is from a low-friction-comfort culture to a high-friction-comfort culture, with all the disorientation that implies.
With the added twist that low-friction-comfort cultures aren't necessarily low-friction. They just push the friction underground. The friction is still there. You just can't see it.
The friction goes from the table to the group chat.
The group chat is a worse venue for it. At the table, you can read faces, adjust in real time, remember that you're arguing with a person. In the group chat, the other person is an avatar and a set of opinions you disagree with. Much easier to escalate.
The Irish pub — famous for its warm conviviality — might actually be a lower-friction environment than it appears. The warmth is real, but it's achieved partly by filtering.
The Israeli argument-at-the-bar might look high-friction but actually be quite low-stakes. The heat is real, but it dissipates quickly and nobody holds a grudge.
Both cultures are solving for something. The Irish are solving for social comfort. The Israelis are solving for intellectual honesty. Neither is solving for both.
Maybe you can't solve for both simultaneously. Maybe there's an inherent trade-off.
That's a bleak thought to end on. Let's see if we can find a counterexample. Is there a culture that manages both? High honesty and high harmony?
I'm not sure there is. I think individuals can achieve it — people with very high emotional intelligence who can deliver hard truths with genuine warmth. But at the cultural level? I think cultures tend to optimize for one at the expense of the other.
The best we can do is be aware of the trade-off and navigate it consciously. Know which culture you're in, know what it's optimizing for, and adjust accordingly — while also knowing what you personally need.
Maybe the real skill isn't choosing one mode or the other, but being able to move between them. Code-switching, as we said. Not perfectly, not without cost, but well enough to function and connect.
The bilingualism of social friction.
Fluency in multiple modes of disagreement.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In nineteen seventies Tibet, a linguist documenting the regional sign language of the Lhasa deaf community discovered that the dialect contained over forty distinct signs for different types of woven textiles — each corresponding to a specific pattern used in traditional Tibetan rug-making — but only two signs for colors, both of which translated roughly to "bright" and "not bright.
I have so many questions about what "not bright" covers.
The entire cool end of the spectrum, apparently.
This has been My Weird Prompts, produced by Hilbert Flumingtop. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review wherever you listen — it helps more people find the show. We're back next week.
