Elaine Parrish wrote:
>

>>><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.
>

Yes, that's what went thru my mind. Hard to believe isn't it. Imagine
not being able to read or write (in ANY country or language). Life must
be so difficult... Those that can don't realize this.

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
>

English of any flavor/flavour (see what I mean) is very difficult to
learn as a second language. It is not always phonetic (shouldn't that be
fonetic) and that causes great problems for people of non-English
speaking countries to learn.
>
As far as I am concerned I don't think the original post was offensive
either - See Jill, now you can sleep tonight

Cathy - who just did a spell check on this with her English/United
States spell checker