I give up. We obviously speak different version of English.
This is correct. When you see "bus" you think of a pleasant safe
clean vehicle that arrives every 5 to 10 minutes, and efficiently
takes you to any part of the city that you need.
When an American sees "bus" they think of an unpleasant dangerous
dirty smelly vehicle filled with poor people and teenagers carrying knives
that takes 60 minutes to arrive even though the schedule promises a
bus every 30 minutes and which only goes to useful places like hospitals,
unemployment office, and dirty smelly dangerous poorly lit bus stations.#
Any unfamiliar venue is "foreign" to attendees, even within their own country.
The only way to make an unfamiliar venue seem "unforeign" is to explain how
things work there. The complaints that come after every meeting follow a
pattern. This pattern identifies which things people find problematic
in "foreign"
venues. I believe that the IETF could reduce the frequency of such problems
by ensuring that these issues are all explicitly covered in a venue guide
prepared with the assistance of the host and other local people. This guide
should be available in advance of the meeting, roughly the number of week
in advance when people start asking questions on the list about trains,
taxis with English speaking drivers and so on.
And it would not hurt to survey all attendees of the meetings, ask if there are
any complaints, and then when the guide is ready, send it to all the
complainers
and ask them if they believe the guide would prevent a recurrence of their
particular issue.
Also note that even familiar venues can change, fantastic restaurants can turn
into striptease bars, the local red light district can shift to a
different street,
the kosher supermarket could be bought by an Egyptian family and turn into
a halal market. And new attendees do pop up from time to time. Even a familiar
venue can benefit from a guide.
Since
yours is native I am obviously in the wrong.
On this I disagree. English is a difficult language for natives to
speak because most
of them lack the understanding of other languages which is necessary to fully
comprehend the meaning of a large part of the English vocabulary. When I started
using the Internet back in the early 90s I was amazed to find that I
could identify
native English speakers in a few sentences. Native speakers of English
almost always
made spelling and grammar mistakes in every second sentence. If someone wrote
grammatically correct English they were almost certainly from Northern Europe
(Scandinavia, Netherlands, Germany, Austria).
Because of this, in the absence of other evidence, I would assume that
you are right
and the native speaker is not.
--Michael Dillon
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