~Russell, ~the guy is a Human also, regadless of nation, religion etc. ~You may not want spend your time teaching him basics. ~But you shouldn't try to "scare him off on the first encounter", ~I think, as you did. ~ If I was in his place, I certainly wouldn't be offended. But ~nobody knows in advance it about particular person ~especially from some countries. ~ As for me, it's not a constructive way to heighten tension ~(accidentally, of course) bettween folks now. :-) ~ Mike. Mike - I'm misunderstood here - my answer may have lost a bit of meaning on "translation" - I'm sorry that I didn't make myself clear enough. I was actually saying just the opposite of what you have understood me as saying. I'm sorry that I didn't make my point clearly enough. But you have in fact helped make the point that I was trying to make - that is, when dealing with people for whom English is NOT their first language. what may SEEM like laziness or rudeness CAN be mainly or completely a result of their lack of grasp of English. We want to encourage such people - not chase them away. This was meant to be an attempt at humorous sarcasm - something which can go rather astray across language boundaries. Maybe I should not have been quite so "clever". If you read my post carefully along with the following notes you may see what I really meant - Wouter van Ooijen wrote: >Russell McMahon wrote: > > But what the hey guys (and gals), This is an expression from a popular american cartoonist - it means "what does it matter" or similar and is normally said jokingly when it really SHOULD matter. (Sometimes it means "what has happened here?") I had just pointed out in the previous paragraph that while it is MOST likely that the person is being lazy (which everybody had assumed was the case) it is also quite possible that they are simply not good at English to make themselves understood well. >> number one seems the > > highest probability > > so lets go for that boots and all shall we? This is the (attempt at ) sarcasm. I'm saying "why bother that we may have got it wrong?" What I MEAN is "we should care that we MIGHT have got it wrong." The trouble with sarcasm is, if people don't understand that is what you mean, then they get exactly the opposite meaning from what you say. > > If it's right (as it probably is) we'll certainly put > > (presumably) him in > > his place, won't we. Truth. But also a slightly sarcastic comment on rudeness. "put him in his place" is a "snobbish " English expression which means that a person is less important etc than they think they are and that people have made them aware of this fact. It is an elitist and unpleasant concept which "nice" :-) people would not want to be associated with. >> If it's wrong we'll probably scare him > > off on the first > > encounter and won't need to be bothered anyway. Lets do it! Also true, Also sarcasm. I'm suggesting that we are happy to scare off beginners. This is what might happen in this case, but not what we would want to happen. You may have noticed an earlier post by me on this subject where I pointed out how he might better ask questions on the PICList if he wanted a useful answer. I also pointed out why the answers that many people had given were "interesting" (sometimes a polite term for rude :-) ). I also pointed out about magic sine waves with filters (before Wouter did)(we both thought alike) and suggested he look at the piclist archives. I also mentioned Wien bridge oscillators and asked some technical questions about eg why he wanted exactly 50 Hz and how much purity he really wanted. Our combined responses do indeed seem to have scared him away. We can be a fierce lot sometimes ;-) Russell -- http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different ways. See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.