Exactly this. You just put them on the spot and they lose face and you're embarrassing them.
Besides this interaction has already made it know they they don't know the answer so what's the benefit of forcing them to announce they they don't know something?
I've only been in a peer to peer type of working relationships with people I'd consider coworkers so I wouldn't think it'd be very fruitful to start agitating people in such a position.
What position? If you let it pass, you encourage this kind of behaviour.
If they are working for a western company, they should adjust their behaviour, not the company. Just imagine working for an Indian company (or manager), and expecting them to tolerate your individualist behaviour and audacious questions. You would be punished immediately.
If it's a peer-to-peer relationship, all the more reason to be firm. If you don't speak up you will never be respected. And don't think that just because you keep quiet the shitty types of people won't stab you in your back at their first opportunity (ask me how I know).
My dad (who worked for BT in various positions) claims he was involved with the decision to move the exchange in our/their village from one end to the other. Coincidentally, closer to the end in which we lived, which I gather would have a non-trivial impact on our internet speed.
I think this probably coincides with the time period we got ISDN, very early, and I was amazed by the concept of _always connected_ internet. I can still vividly remember watching GoZilla download a game demo at 7kb/s, stunned and excited.
I also would have said "Sikh" and "seek" are homonyms until recently when I found out that Sikhs' preferred pronunciation is generally to sound closer to "sick" (aspirate the H if you like)
And yet you wanted to correct someone else, without ever having heard someone say it? I moved from California to Louisiana, and while my pronunciation / idioms used to get poked at in good cheer, I never deigned to correct the natives - "its the ten freeway, get it right, I should know, it starts in my state!"
> And yet you wanted to correct someone else, without ever having heard someone say it?
I've heard "Sikh" pronounced many times by native english speakers and that invariably sounds like "seek". Now that I've heard that it's pronounced differently by the Sikhs themselves, I'll aim to use the correct pronunciation. This is an unusual situation in that I am a "native" (i.e. a native of England) and arguably Sikhs are non-native though I'd expect most of them near us were born here.
Also, the English have a long history of turning up in other countries and pushing their own religion/language/culture onto the natives, so maybe I'm just a product of my upbringing?
Also from the UK and have just learnt that I've likely been pronouncing it incorrectly. Here is a video where a Sikh uses the word several times and it sounds like "sick": https://m.youtube.com/shorts/kM1-DUTgTC4
It feels similar to the situation with "Muslim" or "islam", which have a proper "s" sound in Arabic (as in "messy") rather than a "z" sound (as in "music").
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