Walter Bright wrote:
Yigal Chripun wrote:
As I said before, you must be a much more tolerant person than I am :)
I have long experience with online flame wars. The only way to "win" at
them is to not play.
What bothered me the most about his language was not the fact the it
was insulting but rather that it reduces the readability which is even
more so for non native speakers (which I am).
I mean, it isn't that hard to using the correct spelling (even in
curse words) so that others can understand you. using bad spelling
intentionally like that is plain inconsiderate.
I agree that using obscure idioms or creative spelling can make life
hell for non-native speakers. Most posters' english is so darn good it's
easy to forget english may be their second language.
> This especially irks me every time I see a post that boils down to
> demeaning a non-native English speaker about using "your" instead of
> "you're" or nit-picking on tiny differences of a meaning of a word.
Since "your" and "you are" are quite distinct, it is fair to criticize
misuse of it, if you're going to be a grammar nazi anyway. It's less
fair to criticize misuse of "who" and "whom".
I've lived in foreign countries, and spent enough time overseas to be
very tolerant of non-native english, especially because I need plenty of
forgiveness for my mangling of their tongues.
I've been teaching English in Korea for 16 years. I frequently make
mistakes on my blogs, but the majority of them are typos (I'm a horrid
typist). Even so, I do admit to a large amount of frustration reading
some of the more common English mistakes on the internet (/loose/
instead of /lose/, /amount/ instead of /number/ for countable nouns, and
such). If I know for sure it is written by a native speaker, it takes a
lot of self-control not to email the author the corrected text.
The ironic thing is that I couldn't graduate high school with my friends
because I failed a term of English my senior year. I had to go back for
one more term the following school year. If only Ms. Wendelken could see
me now!
