Yzabel / December 13, 2005

I’m pondering this matter today, after having considered a discussion I’ve had (well, started, too) on a forum in the past few days.The thread itself turned out in an unexpected way. I was ready to wake up to a flood of insults and to an angry mob flaming me for my “evil” views (which all readers here know of: I don’t want children, and am tired of seeing certain people trying to persuade me into it); instead, I discovered that a place I thought ridden with angst and immaturity was in fact also home to a good deal of sensible people respecting others’ opinions.Save for one.It started with an innocent wording of mine—somewhere in my original post, I mentioned that I’m glad my parents don’t give me flak for my choices, which is great, but that even if they were to do so, they wouldn’t have a say in my reproductive life (mark the emphasis here). Nobody else picked on this, except one poster, who, quoting the italicized words hereabove, wrote an answer along the lines of “yes, because God forbids anyone disagrees with you. People can have an opinion, but only if it meets yours.”.From this point onward, I was quite hesitant to answer, and quite puzzled as well. What if I, not being a native English speaker, had inadvertantly used a wrong expression, or worded my sentence in a wrong way? What if I was to lash out at someone who was simply being sarcastic? What if it was my fault? The ways of the Web can be very weird, and very narrow to tread on. I’m not for flamewars, and I’m often afraid to apear as angry or offending, just out of ignorance of the language.I then talked the matter over with a few other people (I didn’t give names nor links), and it turns out that everybody thought the same as me: that this person was being insulting, and not sarcastic (a handful of others posters had agreed with me in the thread, and their answers were such ones: a sarcastif “of course, we all dream of having people telling us what to do”; this explains why I had been wondering about it). Later on, after an answer that I voluntarily left short and way less aggressive than it could have been, the conversation went on. As it stands now, this person is understanding my “they have no say in…” as “I’m a total ungrateful brat who’s throwing my parents out of my life without flinching” (not the exact wording, but in a nutshell, it’s what it meant).Once again, I’m left wondering. Are the both of us speaking the same language? “Having a say in” doesn’t mean “having the right to my opinions”, right? It’s stronger than that, much stronger. Having an opinion is when I tell a friend “you know, I’ve had so many problems with Dell, you can buy one of their laptops if you want, but I’m just letting you know that if you happen to have a problem with it, it might be hell”. Having a say in it is when I’m putting in half the money to buy said laptop, and tell my friend “no way, I’m not giving one cent for something of this brand, if you want a Dell, you’ll have to pay for it all by yourself.Am I wrong or not?Sometimes, not being a native speaker feels very odd and a real problem. And then I wonder why I’m always the one left feeling guilty or responsible, when I can probably speak English better than some of the natives.The ways of the Web are, indeed, very mysterious.discussion, English, internet, language, writing