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Author: WeAreAllKosh

Dec 1st 2012 at 1:15:23 AM

There are two flavors of this:

1) A sincere effort to be understood.
2) A condescending or impatient way of speaking to someone where there's a language barrier, similar to a condescending way of speaking to a child or someone who the speaker thinks is an idiot or "slow" (or may actually be mentally handicapped).

If someone who has very broken English tries to speak at a rapid pace to me, I'll often very kindly ask them to speak slower please. Same if they are speaking a language I'm not too fluent in (Spanish: ''hable mas despacio, por favor'' is a suggested phrase for travellers in this situation in Spanish-speaking lands). But I have heard people be condescending about it, as if the other's difficulty is somehow more ridiculous than their own with the mutual language barrier.

The first variation (the respectful kind) may be PeopleSitOnChairs, but the condescending kind is probably more tropeworthy as it conveys an alterior meaning, albeit an unfortunate one. I've also seen the latter done to "talk down to" people who speak the same language, as if they were an idiot for not understanding them the first time.