Someone sent me this privately, and I think this is a point worth answering on-list, mainly so I don't have to do it repeatedly. I'll shut up about it after this. > Just curious: > > > [Ok, I'm frustrated by people's inability to use English correctly. > > No matter whether or not English is the posters mother tongue? No. For example, the next message in the thread to which that message was a reply was clearly written by a non-native English speaker. It would be silly for me to hold that against them. ESL students rarely confuse their and there, because they typcially learn them via book learning (i.e. they read and write them) before they become good at pronunciation. Native English speakers tend to make that mistake, because we learn the words by sound well before we learn to read and write. There were other more subtle things about that message which suggested that the OP was either a native speaker, or at least conducted the vast majority of his education in an English-speaking country. The case of setup vs. set up is ubiquitous, spread wildly throughout the technical community. That is unfortunate. If the OP was in fact not a native English speaker, then I appologize for taking out my frustrations on him. Even if it were true though, it does nothing to lessen the fact that most such mistakes I see on mailing lists are made specifically by American native-English speakers, nor does it lessen my frustration with my countrymen's inability to speak (and especially to write) their native language. Fortunately for the list, I will not go into the socio-political reasons behind my frustrations. Suffice it to say that I am embarrased for my country that many of you non-native English speakers speak and write English much better than many of my countrymen. -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D
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