[G4] Re: English

[Earle Jones]

On Jun 18, 2007, at 1:54 PM, Eric Wood wrote:

> Our language seems to be shaped by a lack of education, actually. I  
> see
> so many errors online, and now they're present in almost everything I
> read. Typically, they are confusion of things like your and you're,  
> and
> then there's the lesser-known confusion between it's and its. But  
> these
> are just two tiny examples of grammar skills disappearing, and  
> everyone
> getting confused by everyone else making such mistakes. Suddenly,  
> there
> are too few examples of proper English. It's a nightmare to me.

*
Amen!  (As I used to say before I was saved.)

Just by coincidence, the message following your message began (in  
response to a question about the new Safari browser):

    its a *beta* wait until the next rev. dont lose sleep.
    mine crashed constantly.  i just axed it. why worry?

How many violations would one ticket here?

I worked for some years in Asia -- Tokyo and Seoul.  During those  
years, I was the only native English speaker in the office.  I spent  
so much time translating bad English into good English that I came to  
look upon bad English as a language of its own.  I would tell our  
Japanese staff to translate documents into bad English -- don't worry  
about commas, etc. -- just get the meaning right. Then I would  
translate their bad English into good English.

An engineering professor friend in Finland once told me that the  
universal technical language was 'Bad English' -- everyone speaks it  
-- especially Americans!

Cheers,

earle
*
PS:  Do you ever read the NewsGroup alt.usage.english?  Some good  
stuff there.