All my life, I’ve considered myself fairly adept at the English language.
So I decide to switch to English for Grad school and apply abroad.
I get a letter from the school.
Now I’ve got to e-mail them back and ask them to translate it into American.
Cyn:o
Well, this is certainly mundane and pointless. Did you expect to get some kind of advice here? My guess is that you’re not going to get much of a response unless you post some text from that letter and let people see if they would need it translating too.
Which country was the school in?
Well, that’s why I put it here, ev. Maybe I should have put it in the pit and thrown in some profanity, as I was just lamenting in general about the fact that I was never really taught English despite years of grammar.
The letter was from Dublin (incidentally, I just caught the general election thread) and I marveled at the degree to which we’ve lost English as a language in America. This, I suppose, is why I applied for grad school abroad.
But I hunted down someone who speaks the queen’s English and we hammered it out to mean “it could be good, but we’re not telling you right now.” I suppose it was as much Uni-speak as English.
Cyn
I’m guessing (working in a university myself) that some bright spark thought they’d reply in the most convoluted terms possible to try and look clever (like you say, Uni-speak).
Language is all about communication - there’s no point using every last word in the language if only half of them are regularly understood.
