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Comment by greggman | Hacker News Reader

I'm happy to be rejected by people who are anal retentive about spelling and punctuation. They're 100% not my type. This is especially true because I interact with lots of people whose first language is not English which means "bad" grammar is par for the course. The same people that would reject you for having bad grammar are effectively racists

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It's easy to tell when someone's first language is english, and they're lazy, or when it's not, and they're making honest mistakes because they're used to another language. With a little bit of experiences, even dyslexia is easily identified.

I never realised that "speaking English as a first language" was a race.

Hence his use of the word “effectively.” [insert some sort of quip questioning if English is your first language here]

In this context, 'effectively' is a weasel word that doesn't actually change the intent of the comment.

It is a modifier that makes explicit his intention not to use the word literally. Ironic that I'm getting dinged in a thread of discussion about language.

If you want to tell they guy he's hyperbolic (he is), then fine, but don't tell him he said this something was ACTUALLY the same as being racist when he went out of his way not to

"The same people that would reject you for having bad grammar are effectively racists."

Now, how exactly did you arrive at this conclusion? This just might be one of the most, if not the most, ridiculous statements I've ever seen on here.

The poster was probably just drawing an equivalence between people who operate on simple stereotypes. In some sense, both the grammar Nazi and the racist accept the same fallacy.

However, if your grammar is so poor that I cannot easily read your sentences, there is a good chance that I will not try further to read them.

Wow, chatting with them must be like I am writing an essay to my English teacher. Maybe the bar will raise in future and they are going to reject those that do not provide at least 3 preferences.

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