> Frans,
> It took me years to learn how to express myself in a way that isn't
> offensive to other people, and you might note that it hasn't been a
process
> full of success.
> Different cultures have different metrics for communication.
As a Dutchman who's very direct, I know what you mean with
expressing yourself that isn't meant to be offensive/rude but is seen as
such, been bitten by that many many times. I have no problem with that: it
takes a lot of time to understand the difference between can and could, why
'please' is necessary etc.. But that's not the point: the text posted here
wasn't lacking 'smoothing words' (for the lack of a better term ;)) to make
it sound 'friendly' for native english speakers. It was its content that was
interpretable as very condescending. It was very likely not the intention to
be that way, but IMHO that just shows that the writer didn't place himself
in the place of the reader. On mailinglists/email, it's better to be more
verbose than just write 2 lines with very vague context/content.
Oh well...
FB
>
> On Sun, Aug 1, 2010 at 9:34 PM, Frans Bouma <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
>
>
> sorry, but what *did* you mean then? After 21 years of
> internet
> communication I can damn well interpret email texts, trust me, and
> sorry, if
> you meant something else than what I wrote above, simply write a
> different
> piece of text.
>
> FB
>
>
>
