[pct-l] clarification

[Matt Geis]

Just to clarify, I'll address Sean's post.  First off, Sean, sorry for upsetting you.  That certainly wasn't my intent.

(from Sean's post) "somehow I had missed all these so-called advance vocab words (perhaps your bar is a bit low) that I needed to look up."

Secondly, congratulations!  We have a winner!  I promised 5 pancakes to whoever could read Funnybone's journals and not encounter an unfamiliar word.  Here are just a few of the challenging words that posed no problem for Sean.

tetchy
aesthete
timorous
gainsay
jermiad
repine
genuflect

Sean did suggest I was perhaps setting the bar too low.  If everyone out there can immediately define these words, I apologize for assuming that everyone else has the same "low bar" as I do.

As for being condescending, my post was directed only at those who childishly criticized Funnybone's punctuation.  For those who fall into that category, you know who you are, and if my suggestion that he has a better vocabulary than some of the rest of us offends, or speaks more languages than some of us hurts your feelings, get some backbone.  If you already speak multiple languages, good for you (but you probably weren't the ones offended by my post).

My "99%" comment is probably accurate.  I'm talking about people conversationally fluent in THREE OR MORE languages (like Funnybone).  Sean mentions his neighbors speaking English, Spanish, Chinese or Korean.  How many of them speak all four?  In 2000, census data showed 80% of us residents (residents, not citizens) speaking English ONLY.  Another 11% spoke Spanish , and the rest of the languages spoken with fluency were rounded out by Chinese, French, German, Tagalog, Italian...

So, maybe 99% is not accurate, but it's probably darn close.  Let's settle on 90% for an accurate number which isn't the bothersome "sweeping generalization".

I don't recall who posted what, exactly, but I'll confess that my point was to give some perspective to (which is a polite way to say "put into their place") the people who seemed to find it so clever to analyze Chuck's use of language.  If my comments hurt the feelings of folks who aspire to have a broader vocabulary or lament their English-only limitations, crack open a book or go take a class and you'll feel a lot better.  If that fails, go put some miles in on a trail.