Of course, American corporate-speak is unique from normal conversations, and people intentionally use vagueness to make sure there's general agreement before saying something concretely that might be contentious or cause problems.
This is more corporate/middle class.
There's also a working class register which is very direct and sweary, and extreme insults are actually meant affectionately.
Even more confusingly, the two can overlap, and the same people will switch between them - sometimes in the same setting - with relative equals.
Americans don't seem to do understatement. "My business died" becomes "My incredible journey." Relationships are cross-bred with hustle, so you can be friends with someone and they'll ask you to invest in their MLM scheme.
Instead of using understatement US corporate speaks uses noise to act out hierarchy, to gaslight and to misdirect.
I was talking to someone today who was asked to produce a report. They sent it on time, and then the team lead called a meeting to ask why it hadn't arrived.
The report was literally sitting in their inbox unread. Everyone could see it, but they all went through the motions of pretending it wasn't there and developing an action plan for future delivery.
It's all very David Graeber. So far as I can tell the US seems to specialise in situations where corporate insanity is happening but the sharp edges have been filed off, so it looks like productive activity higher up the pyramid.
That is surreal.
Brits say this all the time because they assume we talk like people in movies and interviews do (or they interpret corporate-speak as how Americans actually talk). We use understatement plenty. In fact, the "interesting idea" understatement? I wouldn't even clock it as British because we use that in the US, too. I would say it is a classic example we use here of how you politely call an idea stupid. "Hm, interesting." We don't usually say "that's a stupid idea." That would be extremely rude.
I encounter this same attitude vis a vis Brits and sarcasm. "Oh, Americans don't get sarcasm." We absolutely do get sarcasm (insert claim Brits are being sarcastic when they say we don't get it). Britain is not special in this regard. It boggles the mind why Brits think we don't understand it. The languages are not so far gone.
I tell ya what, "understatement of the year" was not a phrase coined to describe something a Brit said.
You also find observers outside the Anglosphere describing understatement not as a British thing, but an anglophonic thing, including in American speech. https://www.identitytheory.com/anna-wierzbickas-english-mean...
I would go so far as to say that the hedges famous to American English opinion sharing is an example of understatement. "I feel like XYZ" is an Americanism, and it's understatement to the point of re-catorizing a fact as an opinion in order to soften your speech.
I can't tell you the number of times I've heard a Texan describe extremely hot weather as "a bit warm."
Examples abound.
(We also bust balls with our friends, and it lines up with class the same way you describe, including code switching between two registers.)
What Americans tend to not "get" is how dry British humor can be. It's less about not getting sarcasm and more just not finding it as funny. Personally, I blame the number of ads that interrupt our TV shows back when people watched broadcast and cable TV. There really wasn't enough time to build up and the ads are too loud and shouty in comparison.
I see what you did there!
This is not specific to "Americans". Learn any language and you will have the same impression, and experience the same gulf between textbook usage and everyday usage.
It also has words with opposite meanings like 断る (kotowaru, to reject, to ask permission), and 適当 (tekitou, suitable, appropriate, half-assed, careless).
These are known as contronyms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contronym).
In German, these are called splittable verbs, and they can appear in two forms: "upstep" and "step up," depending on the sentence structure. That makes "upstep" / "step up" seem more like a separate verb from "step," rather than just being the same verb with an adverb added on.
— <https://blog.linguisten.de/post/183704949120/any-noun-can-be...>
So 3–8%.
Nothing to do with pretention and everything to do with impossibility :D
I'm willing to bet it's a combination of two factors:
1. you are consuming these things in English, and English natives are less likely to say "English has this word that those other people don't" because they fully understand English so it doesn't seem inscrutable, but some other language is kind of "magical an mysterious" to them. See, e.g., the urban legend that the Chinese word for crisis is "danger" and "opportunity." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_word_for_crisis There's a whole cottage industry around "that foreign language is so cool compared to English"
2. "this language can say X but another language cannot" is invariably wrong
I don't think there is a fear of being imprecise. If anything, it is a fear of speaking plainly as boring.
Reflecting on it now, I believe that metaphors and idioms can help a lot for communicating intuitively and they can convey a lot of information. But at the same time in the situations where a idiom isn't understood by the other, I often have to take a moment to extract the essence of its meaning.
So in social communication, you aren't getting more precise -- in many cases, you're getting less precise and taking more words to handle that. Consider the idiom "shit or get off the pot." You can say that "Make a decision" is less precise. "Do it or don't" is also an idiom but doesn't express the frustration that the vulgarity does. "I am frustrated and need you to either take action or shut up" is more direct and possibly more offensive because it takes formality.
And then there's the prefix of "Sometimes you need to" that turns it from a command to advice. "Sometimes you need to either take action or stop complaining" sounds like the emphasis is on "you" instead of the predicate as if it's a critique of the person, whereas the idiom gives more of a proverb connotation.
The problem is that language carries many layers and "more precise" is a goal in technical communication but neglects the other layers.
But none of that answered why in the absolute world a group would choose to initiate a rhyming slang for things such as the damn stairs. Rhyming slang is purposely obscuring.
It's insane to me, that cockney is half made up of purposely making communication more difficult or insular. Like, I get that there's complicated in group signalling incentives at play, but like, why?
First, most native English speakers have an execrable vocabulary. I seem to remember that most people use less than 2000 (generally much less) unique words when they talk to each other. There is a high probability that they simply don't know the right word.
Second, using the same word over and over again gets monotonous. Using colorful idioms and metaphors is often necessary to keep people's attention. This is triply true in this day and age of mayfly-like attention spans.
Finally, if I'm teaching something, I'm probably trying to give you 3 or 4 different ways to think about the subject in the hope that one of them resonates and clicks so you understand. I don't know a priori which one that will be, so my vocabulary needs to shift in the hope of getting the point across.
For reasons unknown to me, instead of using the word with the meaning they probably are trying to convey, they rather use vague analogies or metaphors.
It always made me question if Americans in contrast to the British are a bit afraid to be precise.