[G4] Re: English

[Eric Wood]

On Mon, 2007-06-18 at 17:08 -0700, Earle Jones wrote:
> 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.
> 
> 
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