grievance: native english speakers attacking foreigners' english

Let me first say that this is not an act of repentance for having (possibly) offended anyone with either my "English 101" blogs: those blogs are intended to castigate native English speakers because IT IS YOUR FIRST (AND/OR ONLY) TOOL FOR COMMUNICATION, and there is no excuse to not use it well and be proud of your written and spoken word.

It is furthermore not repentance for having offended anyone in my "Foreigners Speaking Too Loudly" blog. Foreigners DO speak too loudly and my theory about this fluoresced as I walked out of class yesterday (furious about this new "rageout target") and joined people screaming in Spanish. Don't get it. I really don't. And I digress.

I was in class yesterday... Oceanography class. Life lesson: don't leave core requirements to your last semester. Bleh.

In any event, the professor's first language is clearly not English. And I actually don't know what her first language is. However... HOW-EV-ER... her English is pretty damned near impeccable. And I just got out of an Astronomy lab taught by an adjunct who A. didn't give a shit about the class and B. LEGITIMATELY did not speak English. (That was fun.) Again: do not leave core requirements to your last semester.

In any event, this BITCH in the class decides she will take it upon herself to CORRECT the professor's English. CORRECT THE PROFESSOR'S ENGLISH?! I don't even do that when English is his or her first language. That's a respect issue. My question to this bitch in the class is "have you ever stood in front of a hundred people and posited that you INDUBITABLY KNEW the answers to all questions on some particular discipline? My guess is no. And if you have, you certainly haven't done it in a language that is NOT YOUR FIRST!" Seriously. The task of being comfortable enough in another language to speak as an authority comes with a lot of pressure. And to bust this nice woman's balls about her having said "most thin" instead of "thinnest" is pretty much complete and utter garbage. (Yes, that actually happened; yes, I've been writing this stuff down; yes, I understand that is not conducive to actually learning.)

The only time speech correction really works (from one person to another) is if there is a systematic error in the speaker's understanding of a language's functional pattern (perhaps a good correction would have been "thinnest" if the professor had in fact said "thinner," but had meant "thinnest"; that is a systematic mistake in which the speaker does not acknowledge the differences between superlative ("-est") and comparative ("-er") constructions. And furthermore, an explanation is necessary. And it should have been done in private, you fucking bitch.

Also, I spent time writing down constructions that the professor did make correctly which are proof of mastery of a language and/or are misused by native English speakers all the time (which leads to my point that most English as a Second Language (ESL) speakers/learners speak far better English than the idiots who are raised speaking it.)

She used "farther" instead of "further" to speak about geographical space. (6 points)
She properly used metaphorical/idiomatic language: "soupy." (8 points)
Formal sentence syntax in a spoken statement: "density of the material in which you're trying to float." Who the hell speaks like that?! Well. I do. And I get flack for it all the time. Oh well. (15 points)
Use of the word "lexicon" (of course, in response to this BITCH FACE correcting her - she did handle it very gracefully though). Use of this word shows several things:
1. That's KIND OF a "hard" word, in the sense that not all native English speakers would know what it means. (Allow me to vouchsafe - it simply means "vocabulary.") (3 points)
2. It shows that she has spoken about lexicology and philology enough to use that word. (4 points)
3. SHE APPARENTLY CARES ABOUT THE WORDS SHE USES!!!!!!! (287356229.44 points)

She gets that many points for the last part because that's a lot more than I can say for a lot of people. So I was actually quite impressed.

So why the FUCK would you, a stupid idiot undergraduate student, feel so pious to flash about your faux-erudite-douchebag-ness to try and destroy power levels in a classroom that are necessary for KNOWLEDGE-TRANSMISSION? And embarrassing a perfectly lovely woman. Ugh. Go to hell.

So, folks... don't FUCKING correct foreigners' speech like this. Soooooo fucked up I can't even deal with it. Plus, you're probably teaching them something wrong. Most foreigners who move to the United States see a decrease in the fluency of their proper English skills because idiot Americans teach them slangs that allow them to be lazy. 'Though I am a big proponent and enjoyer of slangs, I would never sacrifice them for actual language.

Girl in Oceanography class, I hope you read this. And I hope you peed your pants in 2nd grade or something embarrassing that would exonerate you from this. Shame on you.

-moon