Gonna acuse me of stereotyping? go ahead. I am stereotyping. But what’s wrong with it? Most English people do speak English. Don’t they?
I know stereotyping is usually wrong. But it often frustrates me when it is completely dismissed. I can never quite turn my thoughts about this into words that express it accurately. There is often one or more flaws in my attempts and these flaws are pounced upon. Sometimes a stereotype is useful to an argument. (not always)
This is trying to be a rant about invariable dismissal of all stereotypes.
My pants are down - take your best shots.
Can I retract this? I feel like I’ve just sleepwalked onto someone’s dinnertable, had a shit, and then woken up.
I know stereotyping is nearly always wrong. I haven’t done it myself for a long time. I just wanted to try to rant about the complete dismisall of them without even wondering, for a moment, how true they might be.
Please don’t read this and the OP as pro-stereotyping.
Many Americans speak English. As do Australians, Guamites, and many Klingons.
Texans speak Texan.
Yes, I am from Texas.
It 'urts me eeyars to heeyar some of youse tawlk!
I have no idea what accent i just stereotyped…
Scouse Farmer
Who accused you of stereotyping? Link?
No-one did samarm this rant came right out of the fog.
If I could link to my brain I would be glad to.
Lobby I gotta hand it to you - you have a way with words. I especially like the dinner table comment. 
You have no idea how flattering that comment was samarm (blush)
Thankyou
My cat’s breath smells like cat food.
I’m currently doing a Google on my head. If I am successful, we shall soon have brain link URLs for everyone!
('m not making fun, I really liked that mental image thingy…)
Don’t worry about it Lobsang, happens to everyone.
Sounds like Dick Van Dyke, circa Mary Poppins.
Cite?
I gotcha cite right here:
Uhh…pass.
Tch! We don’t use words like that anymore, we say Penis Lorry Lesbian.
Lobsang, I guess you meant “generalisations”. And I agree (but you’ve since retracted, so maybe I don’t), generalisations are not only not bad, per se, but are in fact the very things that allow us to make sense of the world. I’m even tempted to make the unsupportable assertion that our (homo-sapiens’) capacity to form generalised models of our environment is the very thing that has made us so successful.
“The sun will rise tomorrow” is a prediction that we’d be happy to make (even without our understanding of the solar system) because of the perfectly good and observable generalisation “The sun rises every day”. Or at least it has so far. (Please ignore the unintended tautology of this example.)
Problems only arise when our generalisations become either too rigid or inflexible to new or contradictory data, or, we become to believe that they correspond to hard and fast rules when in fact they correspond only to observed trends, or, we confuse the general case with the specific.
Lobsang, were you posting drunk again?
I think Lobsang has a valid point. Stereotypes, when true, are valid generalizations about a group of people, many or most of whom conform to a stereotype. It is, however, important to realize that people are individuals who do not necessarily conform to the stereotype.
Most people in their 80’s are somewhat less than agile, and may need assistance. That there’s a competitive skier who is 81 is not a refutation of the stereotype; she’s an exception to the generalization.
And you probably need to pull your pants up if you’re at the dinner table – I’d make some double entendre about the sexual use of the term “eat me,” but after the MPSIMS thread about the guy who allowed himself to be cannibalized, I don’t think it appropriate.
I though Spanish was in the lead?