[Magdalen] Grammar Nightmare.

[Jay Weigel]

When English goes to other non-English-speaking countries and then comes to
America, it gets even more weird and wild, as in some of the dialogues I
had with Indian or Chinese colleagues. Indians (many I worked with were
from Kerala) consistently used the word "told" for "said", as in, "So I
called the doctor, and he told to do thus-and-so." The Chinese were even
more prone to verbing than Americans--"I had to bye-bye that lady and her
house" was my favorite, an explanation of why one did not rent a basement
apartment from an exceedingly strange landlady.

On Fri, Jul 10, 2015 at 9:21 AM, Charles Wohlers <
charles.wohlers at verizon.net> wrote:

> Just to be clear - it's Co-CHICH-u-it
>
> Chad Wohlers
> who used to live ~10 miles from there, but is now in beautiful
> Woodbury, VT USA
> chadwohl at satucket.com
>
>
>
> -----Original Message----- From: ME Michaud Sent: Friday, July 10, 2015
> 6:45 AM To: magdalen at herberthouse.org Subject: Re: [Magdalen] Grammar
> Nightmare.
> One of my favorite local histories is of Natick (rhymes with hay-tick),
> Massachusetts. On the shores of Lake Cochituate (rhymes with the
> *noun* habituate).
>
> In the colonial period, some of the native people were converted to
> Christianity. Their own tribes & people didn't want them back and
> the colonists sure didn't want them either. And so the town of Natick
> was founded. But the people who lived there could barely communicate
> since they spoke different dialects. They were called Praying Indians
> or Christianized Indians. Eventually they were moved off the land that
> had been granted them by the Puritan forefathers (grrrrrr), many died
> of disease or, possibly, broken hearts.
>
> O those Puritans!
> -M
>