🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Jul28.213433.13985@midway.uchicago.edu>, goer@ellis.uchicago.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz) writes:
> kartik@hls.com (Kartik Chandrasekhar) writes:
>>
>>I was disturbed to see how the language is used here in the USA.
>>What I have really come to despise are expressions such as:
>>
>>"I did not get the invite."
>>"Dont do drugs." (Seen on billboards all over the country.)
> 
> When one learns a language in school that is not one's mother-tongue,
> one has to memorize a lot of rules that come naturally to a native
> speaker.  It is easy to get so wrapped up with these rules that one
> begins to see the rules as the language itself, and not as abstrac-
> tions from it.  It is also easy to superimpose the norms of standard
> written English on living speech communities, forgetting that, be-
> cause you are not part of a living community of first-language Eng-
> lish speakers, you haven't had the opportunity to learn the various
> subtleties - regionalisms, levels of formality, etc. - that charac-
> terize British, American, Australian, South Afreican, Canadian (etc.)
> speech.
> 
> If you find colloquial dialects unbearable, given your background,
> then try reading alt.usage.english.  You may find partial fulfillment
> there....

My, we are getting nasty, aren't we?  And xenophobic to boot.

Come on.  Native speakers of English make all of the mistakes that
Kartik complained about, and that you and others have found in his
post.  We have plenty of natives who try to make us write the way
Sister Porcupina wanted us to because she thought that was the only
way.  Kartik didn't tell us anything we didn't already know: that
American newspapers sometimes make dreadful mistakes, and that some
speakers of English (both native and foreign) don't write so well.
Read some of the posts by natives.  Some of you guys don't bother
to capitalize, punctuate, or even try to spell correctly, and we have
constant trouble with posts that simply don't say what the poster
intended.  Even *I* don't always make myself too clear, as a recent
exchange on Black English --> German dialects illustrated.  Let's
just cool it, do lunch, and hope that Bush can be beat.

--Leo Connolly