Fernando -- There's a famous New Yorker cartoon showing two dogs: one is sitting at a keyboard and staring at a monitor. He observes to his companion: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." I really think you were taken in by a high school kid. Are you, by any chance, a teacher with adolescent students?
The message sounds to me very much like the kind of thing I did when I was a 17-year old high school student and wanted to do something nasty to a teachers I didn't like. My guess is that it's either 1) a teen-ager who doesn't like you for some reason, or 2) someone who has written a generic flame message and thinks it's amusing to send it to random people on random lists. Ruby's English is obviously non-native. The style is Latinate. English is a language "à double clavier", to borrow a French idiom. It has two keyboards -- one Germanic and one Latinate -- reflecting its two main influences. An educated native speaker knows how to play on both. Over-use of the latinate keyboard generally reflects either an semi-educated native speaker trying to sound intelligent by using a lot of rare words, or a native romance language speaker doing direct translation. Even if Ruby hadn't claimed to be a Columbian, I would have identified her as a non-native speaker. Ruby uses several words and expressions that would not normally be used by a modern native speaker -- a few of them incorrectly -- although one would overlook this in a non-native speaker. "Futillian" is not an English word. "Iterate" and "infirm" are both used incorrectly, or at least unidiomatically. "Pentalinguist" sounds silly. Nobody would call himself a pentalinguist, which incidently violates the -- admittedly pedantic -- rule against coining words that are half Greek and half Latin. I am a retired diplomat, and therefore a semi-professional linguist. I have found that people claiming to speak a large number of languages are either exaggerating, or counting closely related languages like the Scandinavian Slavic or Romance groups. If all five languages are from the same group, that doesn't really count for much, in my book. I don't think there is a Ruby Bojorquez. It was probably some kid. Jack
