While in principle I agree that people should make a serious effort to write well, in practice it can be very difficult for some people to do it. One of the most astute posters on this board suffers from dyslexia, and that is a purely physical problem that is difficult enough to overcome that he sometimes has to choose between spending enough time to fix his transposition of letters, and not posting at all. So people should make allowances for such things, or they might miss some very good comments.
I think that some of the verbal beatings delivered to Wednesday were given, not because of her obvious typing and grammar problems, but because of her controversial (to some) political views. In other words, certain posters resorted to pure ad hominem arguments. There is nothing wrong with pointing out certain writing problems, when done with grace and moderation, but it is totally out to lunch to resort to only ad hominems.
As for foreign residents of the U.S. not speaking English, I think that most of those who fail to learn proper American English do so out of sheer laziness. I had an aunt who lived for 35 years in Colombia and never bothered to learn Spanish. I always regarded that as gross stupidity and laziness. Her behavior in other ways confirmed that opinion of her in general. She holed up in their apartment and let her husband communicate with the outside world.
I lived for 15 months in Geneva, Switzerland in 1998-1999. I had to learn French pretty quickly to get along in doing everyday things like shopping. Most people I worked with spoke English well. They had to in order to work in a high-tech field at all, and this made it all too easy for me to be lazy and not put in the time required to learn the local language. So I gave in to my natural inclination to be lazy and didn't put enough time in. Why? Because I'm lazy! And I thought that I'd rather do more fun things. Now I'm sorry that I didn't force myself to learn a lot more.
But I still tried. After being in Europe for a few months, we went to Paris for a few days. When we arrived at the hotel I thought I'd try to talk to the desk clerk in French, and so in my broken French I tried to check us in. The clerk looked at me with some amusement and let me go on for a couple of minutes, then said in excellent English, "Shall we switch to English now?" We all cracked up. At least the guy had the courtesy to rescue me before I made a complete fool of myself.
While I personally understand how easy it is to be lazy in learning the local language, there is still no excuse not to, especially not when someone lives for many years in a foreign country. My wife's 1st husband was of Mexican extraction and there were older people in his family who had lived in the U.S. for decades and not learned more than ten words of English. They were as lazy as my aunt and a lot lazier than I was in not learning enough French. One of my stepsons got engaged to a Japanese girl this past year (they recently broke it off) and he spent a great deal of time learning her language, since their plan was to eventually live in Japan to raise their kids. He had the right attitude.
This past year my company hired a Chinese graduate student to work in my design department (we design microchips). We worked together a lot on one project, and I got to know this young man as being a fine person and an extremely dedicated worker. His English was so broken and so heavily accented, though, that all of us could barely understand him. But he worked at it, and after about six months his English was much better. He expressed to me exactly the same sort of frustration in not being able to communicate properly as I had had in not being able to communicate well in French. So this is a universal problem of people living in foreign countries.
I simply can not understand why anyone would avoid learning the local language after being in a foreign country for years. It's the most frustrating thing not to be able to find toothpicks, toothpaste, toilet paper and so forth in a store because you don't know the words. I truly think that it's pure laziness when a person accepts that frustration for years on end because it's too much trouble to learn the language.
AlanF
