Re: OT Caution!! IRA funding (was: English word order and bumper stickers)

On Sat, 18 Sep 2004 00:25:38 -0500, Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...>
wrote:
>Roger Mills wrote or quoted somebody ???:
>> > The word "America", in this context, was almost universally taken
>> > by Americans to mean "the American government", whereas it was
>> > almost universally taken by non-Americans to mean "the American
>> > populace".
(a bunch snipped)

>This problem is so bad now in Europe (by which is
>mostly meant the Continent) that American papers are filled with
>reports of travellers being instantly cornered to be used as sounding
>boards for everything the locals don't like about America and Americans.
Heck, that's not really something new. Around 1979 I had an Iranian friend
whose roommates were also Iranian. Whenever I was there, one of them would
go on and on vehemently about America this and you that etc. I just agreed
:) His english was so bad I couldn't understand most of it anyway. [[ In
hindsight, I probably should have asked him to repeat it in Farsi. ]]
Funny thing. They had a really great deal on the apartment, paying
noticeably less than the going rate. Then one day their rent doubled. It
seems their landlord was a cousin of one of the hostages.

I

> =========================================================================
>Thomas Wier        "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
>Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
>University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
>1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
>Chicago, IL 60637