Law /
Poland three year residency [30]
The bottom line, friends, is that there has been a double standard regarding English for too long!
In fact, the sui generis is called "Globish", to be more precise, "World English" and dates back at least seventy years or thereabouts to the man who first coined the phrase, indeed, who first advocated the use (later MISuse) of English as the world's lingua franca. That man was none other than Sir Winston Churchill:-)
What has irked me for the past decades is the apparent decline in expectations of English usage as compared with that other "great" world language, French.
Last time I checked, English was the language of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Sir WIlliam S. Gilbert, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Emily Dickinson and a host of other luminaries, right up there with the Bard himself, Cervantes, Goethe, even Dante, in my opinion.....but from what's happened lately since digitalization, one would scarcely know it:-)
If a Pole speaking to a Lithuanian computer programmer is honest with both himself as well as his interlocutor about the fact the neither of them knows English that well, but is using it purely as a makeshift language, I have ZERO problem with that.
However, when international types get together and decide the speak English (often badly, I might add) and what's more, justify their poor English as simply the result of globalization, then I go bonkers, because it's nothing more than sheer rationalizing which then puts to shame anyone out there who is serious about true expression. The wrong becomes right and the right becomes weird.
So where are we then?
