The related story my wife tells regarding when the Belgian company she was working for had just acquired their Dutch counterpart. The new owners sent high level

The related story my wife tells regarding when the Belgian company she was working for had just acquired their Dutch counterpart. The new owners sent high level executives to talk to all the new employees and reassure them of what was going to happen. The primary speaker was chosen because he was a native Flemish speaker and spoke multiple dialects as well as multiple other languages. When they arrived and got into the meeting hall, the speaker leaned heavily on the word for “worker”. He promised that everything they would do would be in tight coordination with the Workers Council, etc…. I think he probably used it in just about every other sentence he spoke. At the very end of his long presentation, he asked if anyone present had any questions. There was just one — an older man in the back held up his hand and said: “You do realize that the Flemish word for ‘worker’ is also the Dutch word for ‘slave’, right?” Oy. Language is hard. It’s easy to misinterpret, even if you think you’re an expert, and even if you’re communicating in person. But e-mail eliminates all the unspoken communication like body language and actual tone of voice, which is about 90% of all normal human communication. We need to keep these things in mind, every time we communicate with someone, even if it is in person, and we think we are an expert.