OT: what's with the 'i'?

[Robert Moskowitz]

On 02/01/2013 08:16 PM, Joe Zeff wrote:
> On 02/01/2013 04:52 PM, Craig White wrote:
>> It's clear that you want this e-mail list, informal as it is to respect
>> your sense of proper grammar.
>
> No, it's not "his sense of proper grammar," it's proper grammar as 
> it's been taught in schools in every English speaking country for over 
> a century now.
>
> As I see it, there are three reasons people's grammar on this list 
> falls short.  This is an international list and not all of the members 
> have English as their first (or even second) language.  My attitude is 
> that they're doing the best they can and as long as I can work out 
> what they originally meant, that's all that matters. Second, there are 
> native English speakers who either were never taught properly in 
> school (I have a friend who has trouble with homonyms, using "flue" 
> for "flew" and other such errors because of problems when she was 
> young.)  And, of course, there are the people who were exposed to 
> proper grammar, syntax and word usage but simply don't care.  On some 
> mailing lists, people in both of the latter two groups would be flamed 
> for their errors.  On this one, I keep my opinions to myself because I 
> can't see any way it could possibly help and many ways it could end up 
> making trouble for everybody.

Back in the days on some IETF lists we had a Japanese professor who's 
English was phenomenally good and would flame native speakers on their 
grammer.  Of course the gentleman could not speak a clear word of 
English (and still can't when I occationally meet up with him) which we 
all put up with as his genius really fixed a number of protocols that 
just were not going right.  There are a number of protocols you here use 
all the time that we would still be reving if he had not gotten up in a 
meeting and said, "here is how we should do this".


>
> Now, of course, we're in a long, OT discussion of the issue and I 
> think that if nothing else, it's let all of us who don't like bad 
> grammar to air our opinions instead of bottling them up as we'd 
> normally do.  No, I don't expect this to result in any change, but who 
> knows; somebody might decide to be more careful because they'd never 
> realized how it looks to others.