Re: OT: contractions

> > 3. in my experience, Americans generally have the worst command of their
> > mother language of any literate people I know.
>
>Then perhaps you need to get out more...

What? And ruin all of the hard word hard work which I've put this past year
into creating an image as a intellectual asocial recluse?

>Kidding aside, I'm curious what it is that makes you think this.  My
>experience with other kinds of people that I've met has been much the same.
>Most of the Mexicans I know, for example, have worse spelling in Spanish
>than I do, and that's a pretty low thing to compare it with.  (Though the
>Colombians I know are quite literate...)
Correctly or not, I've reached this conclusion from reading a plethora of
published and private materials rife with misuses of common words (e.g.
"there" vs "they're" vs "their", "irregardless"), dependent clauses without
independent ones, subject/verb discord, and similar grammatical errors.

True, I've seen some Spanish spellings which make my brain cells trip and
stumble, but on the whole, the Spanish, German and French published
materials and private correspondence I read come no where near the level of
gross grammatical errors I find in American English ones.

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