It’s worth noting that in other cultures, tact explicitly signals a difference in status. It seems obvious from how nerds are treated in school, that this is true in American English as well, but is implicit rather than explicit.
Most people, even (especially?) people who grow up in “normal” culture, know that you apply less tact in a conversation when you want third-party listeners to know that you’re above the person you’re talking to. Nerds never enter the reward-feedback mechanism that trains this; they’re at the very bottom so they never get the differential feedback that would cause them to notice that there’s an ‘upslope’ and ‘downslope’, so they never actually learn to decline. (Declenate? I’m not sure what the correct word is here. But it’s the thing that in German differentiates between ‘Sie haben’ and ‘Du hast’.)
It’s worth noting that in other cultures, tact explicitly signals a difference in status. It seems obvious from how nerds are treated in school, that this is true in American English as well, but is implicit rather than explicit.
Most people, even (especially?) people who grow up in “normal” culture, know that you apply less tact in a conversation when you want third-party listeners to know that you’re above the person you’re talking to. Nerds never enter the reward-feedback mechanism that trains this; they’re at the very bottom so they never get the differential feedback that would cause them to notice that there’s an ‘upslope’ and ‘downslope’, so they never actually learn to decline. (Declenate? I’m not sure what the correct word is here. But it’s the thing that in German differentiates between ‘Sie haben’ and ‘Du hast’.)