About levels of formality/informality
An example being como estas/como esta, can people actually take offense to the way they are asked this simple question?
Another example, I was reading about Chilean spanish and apparently slight tonal change to one of their levels of formality can change the intent completely and make the sentence downright insulting.
I can't think of an equivalent to this understanding in English, except for perhaps including curse words or other insults, but that's actually including a vulgar word (How are you, how the **** are you?) in the sentence and not two sentences that translate to literally the same thing (at least in English).
Can a Spanish speaker shed some light on this because I am genuinely curious.
1 Answer
I think there are many otherwise innocuous statements that can be made to sound condescending just by changing you tone of voice.
Oh, Really- can have all kinds of meanings by simply changing you tone. (hard to give examples without audio)
Oh, you handled that wonderfully.
