staffordian wrote:I guess when you tried the 'God, you're getting to be a fat git these days' approach, it didn't quite have the desired response?
What a brilliant discussion this is turning out to be. But don't ever go to Berlin, snowflakes. By the sound of things, "the world's rudest city" is as hilariously caustic as it was fifty years ago when I studied there. (https://www.timeout.com/berlin/travel/b ... r-schnauze)
Even by German standards, the Berliners are considered (ahem) a little bit short of sensitive tact in their verbal dealings with one another.
The neighbours in my crummy apartment block accused me of being too fat, too thin, too smelly, and having ugly girlfriends. (Not guilty on any of those counts. 
) They told me I looked Turkish, which wasn't considered a compliment. The men who delivered my coal would bawl me out if I didn't have bottles of beer ready for them. And the students at the university would absolutely rip you to pieces in the seminar room (making no allowance for the fact that German wasn't my mother tongue), and then they'd buy you a beer. Because being "direct", as they'd put it, was simply their way of being friendly. After a month or two of getting over the shock, you learned how to give as good as you got. And, like the author of the Time Out piece, you'd often find that the Berliners were delighted when you hit back at them with insults of your own. They didn't mind if you called them fat, because most of them were. (Berlin winters put a premium on having a protective layer of blubber under your heavy coat.)
The only drawback was that, when I returned to the UK, I had to swiftly unlearn my habit of being rude to waiters, pushy in the bus queue, and generally socially unfiltered. But I'll tell you one thing. Being in a discussion was a lot more illuminating when nobody in the room was holding back.
BJ