Re: The English language -- a long, painful extrusion
William, the things you report from your wife's experience could also have happened in Germany, or rather happen over here every day. Seems to be a global development. (Or has it always been that way?)
If I were Dave Douglas, I'd be nervous and irritable at interviews too. If I thought American interviewers were bad, I might be even more defensive and precise when interviewed by someone for whom English is not their first language. Most likely a foreign interviewer will work harder to be precise than an American interviewer, but how can he know that going into the interview?
Just a proposal: let him complete his sentences, at least one sentence. I'd rather try to be more patient in correcting all those terrible, carreer-destroying misunderstandings and thereby avoid appearing rude to the interviewer with my paranoia which could, more paranoia!, annoy him and get him to misunderstand me on purpose!
And to make my interviewer working harder after him saying not even a whole sentence: I beg your pardon.
[...] Is the "I beg your pardon" part you begging my pardon, or DD begging EdV's pardon, or EdV begging DD's pardon? Or something else? (In this version, I provide the second point of perspective. Which is better?)
It was your pardon I was begging. I thought it to be an odd, 19th century-ish pedagogical method to try to make someone work harder by interrupting him after a couple of words. But I think I didn't get the whole point of your alternative responses, surely due to the language barrier.
If DD had considered Efrén's English as dangerously weak (why should he?) there would have been many more polite / didactic / operational ways to tackle that.
I agree. But in a world where John Zorn can get away with the rudeness he gets away with, I found Dave Douglas' responses blunt, but not outright rude.
I think this is the ideal point to confess my deep admiration for Dave Douglas as a musician. And to confess my admiration for some outright rudenesses of Zorn I had the luck to witness. But nevertheless... Fritz ############################################## Fritz Feger mail@fritzfeger.de www.fritzfeger.com ##############################################
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Fritz Feger