green

Since being banded I crush most of my meds. I bought a gadget at the drug store that helps me do it.

You can always freeze her out by telling her nicely that you are busy or in the middle of something at the moment. She will eventually get the message that you no longer wish to play with her.

I do believe that BuSh is a taste that is uniquely American. Most foreigners don't get the current administration. There are a lot of Americans who reside in Canada and yet retain voting rights in the U.S. It seemed that they were overwhelmingly Democrat when it came to voting in the last election. This BuSh question seems to be an issue of cultural psychology as much as anything else perhaps. I remember travelling in the USSR at the time of glasnost. All us foreigners loved Gorbachev and yet the Russians hated the guy. Perhaps it's the other way around vis-a-vis BuSh. Most of the world thinks that the guy is a goof, a dangerously deluded one at that, but he was re-elected by the folks back home. It is difficult for us to understand what is going on in America at times even though your country is closely watched and analysed; you are, afterall, the most powerful nation in the world and probably the most valuable one at this time in history.

Hey Cloe, I just checked out your husband's website. He's cute. I'd vote for him!

That's a funny story about the pitfalls of the generation gap, the one about the baad tires. I run into trouble when I am communicating with someone who has no sense of humour. It's caused me a lot of problems and I imagine that you, TOM, have suffered from this as well.

It seems to be pretty much par for the course that men and women interpret emotional data differently. There is a number of studies where men and women are asked to examine photographs of faces and to interpret the emotions displayed. Women and men tend to perform differently, women with much more sensitivity. ..Researchers assume that it is in the interests of women, the weaker and the nurturing sex, to be in tune to the emotions of those around them. As for speaking more than one language, it can be easy and it can be fun. I speak working class yobbo and I speak middle class educated white chick. I also speak French; I lived there for a few years when I was younger. I would certainly be up for learning ebonics if only because the notion of an overweight 57 year old white Canadian woman speaking young urban American Black amuses me. And it would be interesting. Learning new stuff always is.

So now it seems to me that ebonics may in fact just be Black youth talk and now, more generally, youth talk. Am I right? Every group has its own jargon. I build aircraft and am a card-carrying member of the working class. We have our own language and attitudes. What education does is allow one to move more freely between different groups and to suspend one's sense of judgement. Socio-economic tourism can be fun, eh, as well as being educational. Every successful immigrant or upwardly mobile individual is bilingual or maybe even multilingual. There is nothing wrong with that. These experiences can be enriching.

A further note: up here in Canada we hear Carribbean English, not ebonics. "I tell she..." is a classic formulation. We also had this cultural manifestation called wiggers, white kids who talk American black and dress in the style. This was popular about a decade ago. That the kids were often spotty and still with their puppy fat yet wearing pants with crotches hanging down around their kneecaps made it all the more folkloric.

Re Geezer Sue's post: in essence we are asking that they become bilingual in order to compete just as we are asking our immigrants to learn English in order that they may function and prosper in their new homeland. It is however both respectful and a charming gesture to take the trouble to learn a bit of their language when asking them to learn ours. Moreover, a show of reciprocity might encourage your students to learn standard English. This issue is an emotionally weighted one. I used to work as an admissions counsellor for a Canadian ivy league university. I would sometimes see a student whose communications skills were sub-par. "Um, well, uh I would like to become uh like a doctor, eh'" is what the kid would tell me and though I would treat his inquiry with respect I would be imagining his life as a doctor.... "Well, uh, like you got this thing, eh, and uh, it's gonna kill you." The middle class is the dominant class in the industrialised countries; most of us will never get to be stinking rich, the comfortable middle class is the best that most of us can aspire to, and for this one does need standard communications skills. Consider language skills to be merely a tool. I know that I sometimes have trouble understanding what is going on in Black American movies even though I like watching them.

Was it The Usual Suspects? Apropos perception, I read a piece in The New Yorker some years ago about a test conducted at Harvard which proved that eye witnesses were very unreliable. The test ran like this: a professor walks into a lecture hall in order to speak at the podium, drops his briefcase and then leaves the room. Someone later walks in, picks up the briefcase, then leaves. The professor returns, notices his briefcase is gone, and says that he has been robbed. Eyewitness accounts of the perpertrator vary wildly: man, woman, black, white, and of varying ages. This is, of course, a little off the original topic.

The "folk" French spoken in Quebec is known as joual. When some of my friends from France were visiting I rented a very funny Quebecois movie. I got it because it had English subtitles. It turned out that my friends were only able to understand it because of the English subtitles. I was amazed since none of my friends speak much English! As for the misunderstandings which Devana is talking about, these fall into the arena of the psychological, not linguistical. It is true that we may be sensitized by our experiences to read messages into things which may be said in all innocence by the speaker. And of course there are those of us who are thick-skinned and cannot pick up on social nuances at all.

When a man has his hair shaved so close to his head that he looks like he is totally bald...well, Green thinks that that is a very sexy look.

I am interested in language too, and now I am old enough that I am growing curmudgeonly about my mother tongue. I must tell you that I was puzzled by your earlier chat about ebonics. I thought it was a way of teaching English, something like phonetics perhaps. Now the question has been clarified; ebonics is Black American English and thus it is politically correct in a way that speaking rural redneck is not. It is true that Black Americans have been marginalized and were, moreover, originally imported against their will in order to live out their lives as slaves. African Americans feel that society owes them something and those white folks who are compassionate are inclined to agree. Canada, my country, is officially bilingual; both English and French are official languages. That being said, everyone knows that English - or American - is what one has to speak in order to survive and prosper in this, an English speaking world. Though ebonics shows respect to a group of individuals who were maltreated, the laws of social Darwinism insist that minorities learn to adapt.

Divorce is a difficult time, no two ways about it. I was married and divorced while I was still in my twenties. My parents' marriage lasted a lifetime and I too believed that I was marrying for life. I married a musician and he was unfaithful. He was also lazy and didn't bring home much money; the marriage couldn't take this last blow. Though I was the one who decided to divorce the actual process was a painful one for me. I did get over it, however, and went on to become friends with him and his new woman. She is one of my closest friends in fact. My ex-husband has great taste in women. :heh: He never gave up womanizing but she chose to put up with it although she was unhappy about it; she loved him a lot more than I did. I went on to have an extremely interesting life. He, poor fellow, recently died of cancer. I was glad that I could be there for him and his wife. You will get over your pain and go on to have an interesting life and you will feel better. Time does cure many ills.

Abraham Lincoln! LOL That's hilarious. Were you laughing? I would be, and I would be tormenting the poor gerund-dude with many questions about his feelings on his assassination.

I have heard that much of our customer service calls are now handled off-shore in India, a country that is very fond of the gerund. They say that it is cheaper to route our calls to India and that we are none the wiser since the local folk are trained to speak American English. Perhaps this fondness for the gerund is harder to eradicate than an accent and now we are wanting it, the gerund that is, too.

Oh, I am feeling kinda wordy this A.M. I want to say that I agree with TOM. The events of 9/11 were truly horrifying for Americans and for Canadians, too. We lost some of our citizens that day. We also housed some of your homeward bound citizens and aircraft north of the border when all flights were shut down; we were pleased to be able to help out in any way we could. Europe has been subjected to acts of terrorism for a long, long time. The response over there is very much different. Rather than going off to invade a country, an expensive undertaking, they begin to do police work in order to find out who committed the atrocities, and once this is found out, they work to bring the perpetrators down. In the case of the acts of 9/11 the perpetrator was the al Qaeda network, the mastermind was bin Laden, and that was who the State should have targeted. Isn't this the kind of work the CIA used to do in its quiet fashion? Assassinations off American soil, busting up foreign networks which are hostile to perceived American interests, etc? Or maybe I've been reading too many thrillers.

Well, you are all wonderful people. I was afraid that I might receive some harsh criticism for airing my views because I am a foreigner. I would like to thank you all. Though I am very much pro-choice stories of women who use abortion as their main form of birth control shock and appall me. It is indeed like choosing to drown litter after litter of kittens instead of getting the cat spayed. In fact I wonder if a woman who functions in this fashion doesn't have a couple of screws loose and should see a shrink. On the other hand, one has to wonder what the fate of those children would be if they were born and being raised by a woman who would abort 'em all. In an ideal world every child would be a wanted and cherished child. As you have gathered, I am very much for universal medicare. I think that it is the kindest thing that government can do for its citizens, all of them but especially the middle class and the working poor. Healthcare is cheaper, too, as the middlemen, the businessmen that is, are cut out of the equations. Statistics show that the United States pays roughly $2000 more per year per capita in healthcare than the countries which have socialized healthcare programmes. There is, however, a looming problem with all social programmes in countries where the birth rates are dropping: this comprises all of western Europe and Canada. The United States doesn't seem to have this problem. Your population is continuing to grow. In countries like ours we are facing an ageing and therefore expensive population and not enough young workers to keep the treasury topped up. People are expensive when they are young - education - and when they are old - medical expenses and old age pensions. To some extent we rely on immigrants to help us out of this problem. We take the brightest and the best educated away from third world countries where they need them. And the Province of Quebec offers money and tax breaks to its residents to have more children; this doesn't seem to be working though. Quebec's birthrate is very low.... This is how demographics affect social programmes. I thought you might be interested.

Good point, Carlene, and thanks.

Oooh, Tim sHorten's! That is so Canadian.

I am a foreign national, a Canadian, and so I am commenting from the outside. I am surprised by those states who vote against the right to choose for these are invariably the same states that are cheap when it comes to the care of this very child who they claim that they want to save. Women who have money usually have education as well. They are less likely to find themselves accidentally pregnant and when they do find themselves pregnant, well, they can afford to go to a state that does provide easy access to abortion. It is inevitably the poor and under-educated woman who, upon finding herself pregnant, is going to also find herself up a creek without a paddle if she is living in the wrong state. She must have the child and yet she will get inadequate pre- and post-natal care. The child will grow up in an environment where he or she is undernourished and has no access to a quality education. These states, those which inevitably are the conservative states, are effectively breeding an underclass through denying their women the right to choose and, at the same time, denying them an adequate social safety net. On some of the earlier posts on this thread people have commented that the Republicans are the moral party and that is why they vote for them. How can this be? This is a party that marches hand in hand with big business and doesn't seem to care about either the middle class or the working class. The trillions of dollars that this government is spending in Iraq could give your country universal health care or level the educational playing field. Are the Republicans moral simply because they don't approve of women's right to choose and because they toss around the term family values? And who is against family values for that matter? Is anyone in the world against the family? Everyone loves their family and understands that the family is something to be cherished. It is always important to look behind a slogan that pushes the buttons in order to see if it actually means anything. As for universal health care, something which we have up here in Canada, here is the scoop: if you live in a major city you will receive good if not stellar medical care. My health care is stellar. I live in Toronto. Those who tend have problems are those who live in thinly populated areas of the country. Canada has thinly populated areas; we are a polar nation and our overall population is small. It is difficult to attract doctors to work in the outback and far more difficult to install hospitals with big-ticket diagnostic machines. Privatized medicine is not going to change Canadian demographics. The goods go where the population is. This is how economics works. What we hear about your health care system is this: if someone in your family choses the wrong disease you can end up on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Declaring bankruptcy is no longer an option. What my brother, a doc who practices in the States, says is that he has to adjust how he would ideally like to treat his patient to fit that patient's financial profile. This was never a constraint while he was practicing in Canada. It is possible that you are receiving disinformation about our medical system from your politicians and the business interests which animate them. And there are rural folk who will have problems with our system but they won't fare any better under privatized medicine. Mind you, our climate stinks.

Congratulations on selling your home. I was going to say that though my taste is kinda of ideosyncratic my former houses sold to other women. The issue is always the target group of course. If you are selling to people who are similar to yourself and your place is pretty, well maintained and clean then you should be okay. In my city yuppies like houses that use lots of colour even though real estate agents always advise sellers to stick with neutrals. This is because colour is in if it is done right and if the colours are the ones that are in this season. Selling a house is difficult, that's for sure.

Green would be interested to hear how TOM's wife's language changes after she has spent a month in the mother country.

Ooh, there are big problems with language. I am always distressed by the confusion between lay and lie. One is intransitive and one is not but now everyone is laying down not lying down. In order to hold on to my sanity I remember what my linguistics professors told me: language is alive and thus is always changing and it is common usuage that makes for correct usuage. This doesn't make me any less unquiet when I hear language that offends me but it helps me shut my gob when I hear my husband tell me that he was laying down when he really was lying down. I also get pissed when I hear about people gifting each other when it would be so much easier to give each other. I know that I have a number of gifts and so might be called gifted but the most that I will ever do when it comes to relating to another human being is give 'em something. And as for "I'm loving it," this sounds kinda like South Asian English, doesn't it? "Excuse me sir, but I am having to disconnect your power bar cord, and so you should be saving your information." I mean no respect by this; it is just an observation that I am having.

If they all had big b**bs then you might be in bimbo land.