On Friday 30 September 2005 14:22, JB wrote:
On Friday 30 September 2005 07:58, Marlier, Ian wrote:
Quit top-posting!
Quit hectoring!
-- Stop the invasion of illegal aliens swarming across our borders! <www.minutemanproject.com>
Stop the invasion of xenophobic maniacs? If there's any invading going on at the moment, we know who's doing most of it.
If you can read this, thank a teacher. If you are reading it in English, thank a soldier.
You might care to thank the English, old thing, as we had a fair bit to do with setting the language up in the first place. As to its distribution by military means, again it's probably the British army and navy to thank for the thoroughgoing dissemination of the tongue, but I'm not sure that's something we want to boast about in retrospect. As a culture matures, it ought to begin to see that wandering the globe stomping on others is neither seemly nor right. We've spent the last fifty years feeling increasingly bad about our conquistadorial behaviour, for all the right reasons, even though the lesson does not seem to have been learned as thoroughly as it might. All a bit off topic? Yes, agreed, but in that case could people avoid putting racially and politically tendentious material in their emails, signature area or otherwise. You'll notice mine contains my name and address rather than cryptic sniping at non-English speakers and a meaningless pair of initials. -- Fergus Wilde Chetham's Library Long Millgate Manchester M3 1SB UK Tel: 0161 834 7961 Fax: 0161 839 5797 http://www.chethams.org.uk