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Originally Posted by flinde
Guys from the "educated" town north of SA who place a high store on grammar and spelling.
In a successful, tolerant multi-cultural hub (such as San Antonio), you learn that not everyone has English as a first language, and not everyone has been educated in a system with English as the first language.
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I didn't have to learn since I learned English as a second language.
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And, you learn to accept the effects that learning grammar and spelling in another language may have on someone communicating in non-native English. Not judge a person's communication skills, or intelligence based upon their efforts to express themselves in English that may be a second (or third, or fourth) language.
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I made no inference about the intelligence of the posters in the threads, I judged their grammar and spelling as atrocious. My opinion that the accusation was dumb and motives for making the accusation transparent was not based on grammar or spelling of the poster.
Though you bring up non-native English speakers as a blanket excuse, I don't see the sentence structure or word usage typical of a Spanish speaker in those posts. Punctuation usage is similar between English and Spanish, so that shouldn't be a tough concept to grasp for Spanish speakers either.
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I would suggest that that the garden variety grammatical expert from the "educated" city north of SA try this before pronouncing grammatical judgment upon others:
Join a BBS such as this one in say, Monterrey, MX (I can suggest one or two). Express yourself there in your best written Spanish. Then, ask a native Spanish speaker to rate your fluency.
If your Spanish is as perfectly proper as your queen's English as expressed in this thread, then feel free to judge away.
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If I were to travel to Mexico and see the need to post on a board there, I would make clear of my handicap with the language in my signature and beg leniency first.
I would also make effort to learn the language rather than pick up idioms and slang first.
Don't get me wrong. As I said, I bitch about some of the posters here as well.
You don't have to put educated in quotes, it makes you sound bitter about it. It's been documented that Austin is one of the better educated cities in the country.
Hopefully you won't have the grammar police waiting to arrest me at the bar. 