Re^2: Stop with the interview questions already

[Jenda]

The question of the origin of the author may very well help the understanding. If the question is posted in a very bad English and I can guess the native language of the poster is Russian (or Polish or Czech or some other Slavic language) I can make use of my knowledge of Czech and Russian to make some sense of the garbled sentences. Sometimes even translate the sentences word by word into Czech or Russian and thus find out that he/she chose a wrong option from the list of translations suggested by the dictionary and finally understand the question.

Likewise the knowledge that the poster is Indian combined with even a basic understanding of the way the Indian languages are built can help understanding the question and/or understanding that the person is not rude, but rather that he/she doesn't speak English well enough to know he/she should use "please" because in his/her (I hate this "gender equal" nonsense) language he would use a different word for "you" to basically mean the same thing.

Besides "how come Indians tend to behave one way while Americans behave that way" is often an interesting and important question. If you do not notice the nationalities, you'd just wonder why "hchkrdtn" and "bflmpsvz" behave this way and "enejeia" and "aeiou" behave that way. And you find out nothing. You can't even start wondering whether it's something in the school system, language, religion. And you can't understand why the bunch of people, for example, sound rude. While it IS because they are Indians. And because in their language the "being nice" and "being rude" is encoded in a different enough way that they do not know they are sounding rude.

[Anonymous Monk]

(I hate this "gender equal" nonsense)

The use of the third-person plural pronouns ("they") to stand in for gender-neutral third-person singular pronounds ("he", "she") in English go back a long way. There is and was no reason to abandon them for an awkward neologism.