After reading some of the responses in the previous post, I realize that there are some misunderstandings. So I better clear things up before it gets out of hand. Firstly, I knew making fun of others is like playing with fire. You get burnt if you are not careful. Occasionally, we make fun of others in one way or another. As I said, it is normal as long as we do not go overboard with it. In this case, I hope I have not.
ShaolinTiger expressed his unhappiness (in the comment) over people who make fun of other’s linguistic shortcomings. I totally agree with that and that we should never make fun of others in this area. I have close friends who may not speak the best English in the world. Therefore I have learned to respect this “rule”.
I do not believe that I was making fun of the cyber cafe owner’s English mistake (ie. chating instead of chatting). I was merely pointing out a spelling mistake. If I am not mistaken, there is a section in one of the local newspapers named “b00b watch” (or something like that) that does the same thing. It displays photos of signs/banners with spelling mistakes and corrects them.
This brings me to another point. There is a difference between laughing at a spelling mistake written on a banner/signboard/window etc and laughing at a person speaking broken English. The former could be due to genuine human error. Meanwhile, the latter is plain evil. In this case, I think I wasn’t in the “evil zone”.
As for the point on the “yellow writings on the window”, I do not believe it made fun of a person’s English. In fact, it has nothing to do with language. As I mentioned in the earlier post, I suggested that they were replaced with a more generic term like Internet, games, printing, etc.
I apologize if I offended anyone unconsciously. No hard feelings, ok?
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[...] Added: There seems to be some misunderstanding, so I have written another post (initially, it was a comment but it was too long). Read this. [...]