Jesus, save me from newsgroup gurus spouting their ignorance.

That innocent abroad, West, wrote to Triode Dick (a benefactor of
DIYers):
Your web site is simply fantastic. Unfortunate for me, I do not read Dutch. Many Americans are talking about your site. Have you ever considered to have it repeated in English?

Yo, Westley, everything you need to know is on those excellent
circuits, and Dick has actually published some instructions in English.
Nice of you though to let him know you appreciate his hard work and his
generous attitude.

The Atlanta garage vermin Jon Yaeger wrote:
To ask someone to translate their language to English for your convenience seems so . . . . . . American!

Don't you guys just despise rentboys who hate their own people?
They're probably diseased rentboys (and crooked garage traders)
because they have no respect for themselves. But I don't think we
should let them get away with having no respect for a entire great
nation.

The ocker Aussie Patrick Turner wrote:
But don't americans speak american? Do you really mean to tell me they speak English?

They speak and write better English than you do, Patrick. Compare the
otherwise wretched Ludwig's glib errors with your awkwardness in your
mother tongue and no further evidence need be called. Stick to ****ing
sheep and your bolshie brickie's reflex anti-Americanism won't trip
you up.

The Mexican redneck Bret Ludwig wrote:
West Coast American English is now the world canonical standard. Northeast US English is more similar to British English than the Midwest/West Coast version FWIW.

You're a blustering idiot, Ludwig, with a perverse talent for
expressing certainty in exactly inverse proportion to your knowledge on
any subject. In this case the observable truth is diametrically
opposite to your claim; no wonder you claim your erroneous version so
loudly and so certainly. The canonical standard of movers and shakers
is that midatlantic version of English heard in the Northeast US, not
on the West Coast as you claim. One has to be rather low on the food
tree to aspire to speak as one hears actors speak in Hollywood movies.
I can understand how you made the error; you should try getting away
from your street corner gang more often.

The tonedeaf PA electrician Don Pearce wrote:
Americans don't speak English, they speak American.

I can understand why you have to do PA rather than audio, Don. You're
tonedeaf. I imagine that you speak the same way most people who need to
travel to earn a living do, with an intonation somewhere between
Sandhurst and Hyannisport, that accent which the ignorant, the envious
and closet socialists decry as "mid-Atlantic" or
"multinationalspeak" or "adman anglo-american", because if you
spoke one of the English dialects so beloved of the left**, no one
would understand a word you say and you would not do any business.

Besides being tonedeaf-not that I think it matters for a PA
merchant-you are also, once more, spouting ignorantly on a subject of
which you know nothing. Americans speak English, and a large part of
America speaks better English than the politically correct English do.
In the leafy Pilgrim States you can hear the authentic tones of
Plymouth and Portsmouth some centuries ago. Now, to save you the
embarrassment of being corrected twice in the same thread, let me
immediately answer your next dumb objection, that I am confusing an
Irish accent with English, before you even utter it. You're wrong.
The final, incontrovertible authority is the BBC Pronunciation Unit.
They say the finest English in the world is now spoken in Ireland, in
St Colombines, a private school (what you call a public school*) in
Dublin.

I trust that has cleared up this matter.

Andre Jute
Visit Jute on Amps at http://members.lycos.co.uk/fiultra/
"an unbelievably comprehensive web site" -- Hi-Fi News & Record Review

*Though I speak quite a few languages, and in many of them all the
dialects that can make one fit in (in France, for instance, one
doesn't when in the provinces speak like the 16th arrondissement of
Paris unless one wants to be ripped a second fundament by the local
traders, except in August when no one in his right mind is found in
Paris and the provincial traders are fully occupied ripping the English
a second arsehole), I have on second thoughts turned my face against
multilingualism (I never believed in multiculuralism even when it was
freshly minted-it was a sleight of hand then and now stands exposed
for what it always was, a political crock, and a leaky one at that).
Cosmopolitans universally speak English. Civilized peoples universally
speak English. The middle classes, the bedrock of civil, peaceful
society, universally speak English. More Chinese speak English than
Americans who speak English. English is compulsory in Russian and
Chinese schools. Let them learn English. Communication is peace. I grew
up in South Africa where the Afrikaners turned their language into an
irredentist cause; I have lived the last quarter-century in Ireland,
where a minority of the Irish have turned their language (Gaelic) into
an irredentist cause. Other European terrorists like the Spanish Basque
and the Moldies that bother the Dutch, are all given root by their
distinct languages. Let everyone speak English, let's ban all these
other chattering tongues, and be done with wars. The history of those
languages is worthless against peace, and their literature can be
translated into English; most of it is crap anyway, their only value
lying in being written in some nationalist's treasured language,
another cause for irredentism. (I admire the Dutch, for instance, for
always being on time for appointments and for being equally rude to
everyone, but their greatest book is about a lawyer, which is already a
bad start, and the denouement, the high point of supposed excitement in
a thick book, is where he says he will never marry because he's
married to the law. That's like having John Grisham as your entire
nation's nearest approach not even to Shakespeare but to Jeffrey
Archer. Or take the French, who claim to be the guardians of cultu
their most worthwhile literature, of which there is quite a bit,
announces itself as worth preserving, though not necessarily in French,
by lending itself to comprehensible translation into English, the rest
merely highlighting once again the talent of the French in their own
language to say nothing meaningful with supple beauty and much
pretentiousness; that is why Americans and often the British too are so
baffled by highly rated French politicians once these jokers enter the
international arena and the pitiless translation of their every word
into English exposes their perfervid vacuity. As for Scandinavian
"literature", it's like having to read Jude the Obscure over and
over again, which just goes to prove how evenhanded I am; Thomas Hardy
the most boring writer who ever lived.)

**For our American friends, there is a social hierarchy in British
education. First of all, children get a better education in state (and
some other) schools in Ireland, Scotland and Wales than in England
itself. In most of these places, the comprehensive school is the lowest
common denominator, in the most pejorative sense possible, followed by
grammar schools (theoretically for gifted boys from the lower classes
but in fact monopolized by the children of the middle classes), all of
the preceding being publicly funded schools, followed by what are known
as "public" schools which are in fact fee-paying private schools
(Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Rugby, etc, like Philips Exeter or Philips
Andover or Groton in the States). These exclusive schools are
"public" because anyone whose family has the right connections and
the right money can attend. They are "public" by contrast with
being *privately* educated at home by tutors. Until mid to late
Victorian times the richer aristocrats, tutored at home, sneered at the
lesser aristocrats who were forced by (relative) penury to send their
children to Eton... About the time Winston Churchill, the grandson of a
very grand duke, attended school, attitudes started changing, thought
not being tutored at home was one reason the very highest level of
British society for the vastly greater part of his life considered
Churchill not quite sound.