Personal Talk Archives - understand-culture

The Peach

The business writer Erin Meyer places the United States among the peach cultures described by Fons Trompenaars. In them people “share information about themselves, and ask personal questions of those they hardly know.” Further in, “you may suddenly get to the hard pit protecting someone’s real, or at least more private, self.”

MIT’s office for international students quotes the same image. Americans are “soft on the outside, easy to approach, but the pit is harder.”

Let’s Do Lunch

Let’s do lunch. Let’s get coffee sometime. By 1985 a Los Angeles Times columnist was already joking about the first: “Let’s do lunch sometime, have your girl call my girl.”

MIT’s office for international students explains such invitations to new arrivals. An American writer on the page says that when people say “Let’s get lunch!” it “seems like they don’t really mean it.” If an American is serious, “they will propose a time and place.”