This article claims that impoliteness may function otherwise in intercultural interactions than in L1 communication. It is presumed that for nonnative speakers, the priority of an expression's semantic analyzability and their L1-grounded former experience in meaning processing strongly affects how politeness/impoliteness is rendered. Centering on propositional meanings, interlocutors may sometimes be unwitting of impoliteness because it is transfered implicitly or via paralinguistic means that work differently for speakers with divergent L1 backgrounds.