On Sun, 15 May 2005, kilikini wrote:

> Gal Called Jani wrote:
> > One time on Usenet, "Rona Y." > said:
> >
> >> it's the implication
> >> that because he was foreign born, he couldn't read or understand
> >> that the pasta should have been refrigerated or frozen (and was
> >> therefore stupid--implied, not stated by the tone of the post--she's
> >> so lucky to get free pasta because some dumbass foreigner couldn't
> >> read).
> >
> > <snip>
> >
> > Funny, my take on her comment was that the fellow had a very good
> > reason for not reading English -- he wasn't born here. I didn't think
> > she implied that being non-American made him "stupid". Maybe
> > predjudice
> > is in the eye of the reader...
>
> High five, Jani! I'm in total agreement with you.
>
> kili
>

Add me to the list, too. I thought the reply rant was way over the top. I
didn't see prejudice in the original post. It seemed to me that she
relayed the incident factually. There was no racial slur. She didn't make
fun of them. She didn't group the entire nationally in to some illogical
category. She shops there all the time, so she doesn't hate them. It is
not at all unusual to find non-native speakers having trouble with the
language. We have a lot of people in this country that were born here
several generations over that can't read or write well or not at all.
Those that come here from other countries do an amazing job of learning
our very complicated language - to speak, to read, and to write - without
the benefit of formal education that would teach them as we were taught as
children - one step at a time. But some of them don't. Maybe they would be
poor students in their native land - as we have an overabundance of
native born who are. If we have native born people that -for dozens of
reasons - cannot learn the language of their birth, it is not unreasonable
to expect that those who are new here might be having some problems. I
think what she did was very compassionate. She could have let the store
lose the entire shipment.

Elaine, too