Anyone who has worked in an office knows the local dialect. "Per my last email" means "you did not read it". "Just circling back" means "I am beginning to lose hope". "With all due respect" means that a small amount of respect is due, and has just run out. Whole careers are spent translating.
Politeness is, of course, a virtue. A workplace without it would be a place of daily wars. But there is a point where good manners stop smoothing friction and start hiding it. When nobody says what they think, decisions slow down. The meeting that was meant to take twenty minutes lasts an hour, because everybody is offering "interesting thoughts" and nobody is saying "no".
The trap works like this. Honest disagreement feels rude, so we replace it with a code. The code feels safe, so we use it more. Then somebody does not understand the code, and the misunderstanding becomes a real conflict, which now has the extra insult of having been politely ignored.
It is tempting to blame the young for being direct, or the old for being indirect. Neither generation is wrong. The problem is that politeness has become a substitute for clarity, when it should be its companion. The best colleagues I know are both kind and clear. They say: "I disagree, and here is why", and they say it with a smile.
A small experiment: this week, say the plain version of one sentence. Instead of "Perhaps we might consider other options", try "I do not think this will work." The sky will probably not fall. Your colleagues may even thank you. After all, they have been waiting years for somebody to translate.
Fiction note: All people, places and events in this text are fictional.