This paper takes as its starting point the existence of different strategies, in British English and Spanish, when making requests as set forth in various studies of politeness phenomena. In order to account for those differences, the authors single out one aspect: the use of bald on record strategies in Spanish, that is, direct acts that threaten the speakers' negative / positive face, which are very infrequent in English. Closely associated with this, the authors take account of the use of compensatory strategies in Spanish, some of which are conventionally fixed by means of discourse markers like hombre / mujer, whose use the authors reexamine in this article. The use of those discourse markers seems to demonstrate that there may be similar pragmatic strategies in each language. However, the precise linguistic forms that have become conventionalized differ cross-culturally.