My mother was German and she didn't really want to teach me to speak her language. I was too young to understand that "her people" were "the bad guys" in a global conflict a couple of decades before I was born and she was probably just trying to protect me from potentially life-ruining prejudice. So I persisted in asking questions about her mother tongue. How do you say this in German? What does that mean in English? And one day we talked about German having a personal or informal form of you and a separate impersonal or formal you. I was a fairly young kid, maybe something like eight years old, trying to understand this alien concept my language and culture lacked and I said something like "So if I wanted to insult someone, I would use impersonal you ." Because I'm a child and my limited life experience was mostly with family and friends and I'm thinking something like it's rejecting and othering and will distance people from me and sig...