From: "James Newtons Massmind"
>> While many, on this list and elsewhere, can handle English
>> which is somewhat "hacked about" there are some few who,
>> despite their very high intelligence and great skills in
>> other areas, repeatedly demonstrate their total inability to
>> handle linguistic excursions which are well within the range
>> of normal (2 std deviations say), and consequently take
>> people to task over such rather than either ignoring or
>> accommodating them.
>
> "I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way" said 
> Mark
> Twain and I feel the same for people who can't manage a little puzzle in 
> the
> usage of words.
>


I'm one of those who use english as a 27th language. I'm in the USA for the 
last 5 years of my life and I handle my communication needs very well. Of 
course I still make many errors, mainly grammatical when I'm speaking, but 
there's also the issue of accent.

Most often than I like, I bump into people that are so arrogant that think 
there is only one way of saying something, and "their" english is the right 
one (or they are really mentally challenged to understand language 
variations). My former boss was a perfect example. We were a team of 
multi-cultural programmers (brazilian, russians, italians, etc), and 
sometimes my boss couldn't understand what the russian guy was saying... but 
I could... and my former boss had obviously his whole life experiencing 
English as I only had 5 years.

Padu 

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