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Comment by falsestprophet | Hacker News Reader

It makes my day whenever an intellectual lightweight gets together with a thesaurus.

What's clear to me is like you're inexperienced in life, she's inexperienced in english.

Whomever wrote this is fluent and has idiomatic English. That is the best part about this: she believes she a gifted poet, but she really should know better.

I stand by my snooty comment.

English second language speakers (like myself) often use words out of place or the wrong words. The reasons for that is simple - often you think of something but there is no direct translation (there aren't a one to one mapping between words in languages). Another reason is that you have to keep on using new words - otherwise you will end up with the vocabulary of a five year old.

(Shrug) When I need to do something outside my core competency, such as publishing a letter in Farsi, I ask for help from someone qualified to do so.

How hard can it be to find someone willing to look over an English letter and offer suggestions?

Now how practical is that? I'm bulgarian, my english is bad, my accent is even worse. I take it that there is no right language, no right accent.

I take it that there is no right language, no right accent.

I can't speak for Bulgarian, but English has standard rules of grammar, spelling, and usage. Anyone who's made it through K-12 public education in the US should be able to help you with those rules, if you ask them.

If you're trying to communicate, why not make the marginal effort to do it right? Or is that an ethic only native-born English speakers should adopt?

I'm from England and I sometimes struggle to make myself understood here in the US! I'm a lot more sympathetic to my colleagues who have English as a second language now, it's far from a 'marginal effort' to do it right.

I'm grateful that people are making an attempt to share something in a language I can understand, I don't see the gain in making them feel bad if they break a few grammar rules in the process.

That is the most hurtful, and the most truthful thing I have heard all day.

Hah. Perl-esque - awful language, but huge library. Not the same - ahem awful language might or might not mean intellectual lightweight - it could be intellectual drunkard - but HUGE LIBRARY (cpan that is)...

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