We're in a bit of an era of establishing finer- and finer-grained politeness laws, all of which presuppose that the recipient's perception of a communication is all that matters.
> all of which presuppose that the recipient's perception of a communication is all that matters
... and assuming that the listener is able to parse and then object to phrasing on the fly. Phrasing can matter, but fine-grained hypercriticism is mostly a useless exercise.
And furthermore that the recipient is not capable of moderating their own perception, or communicating directly with a person who offended them to work it out.
