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If one word was all that was needed, maybe I should have been asked to include it or at least explain my intentions.

That's fair. However, the lack of that one word changed the perceived meaning of your entire text into something personal and offensive, so neither I nor stormy present realised that one word would have done it, I only realised it upon re-reading your text in light of your previous reply.

may I ask why should I be forced to include certain "keywords" in my opinions instead of others?

You are not forced anything, but are advised for the sake of being understood correctly. If two of us independently read 'Americans' to mean 'All Americans', then that's perhabs because the default meaning is usually the latter in that context. Or not. I now get a faint suspicion that this might be a case of differences between languages. At least there is a difference with my mother tongue - in it, you can't say 'Americans...' without a prefix, and if you say "the Americans", it means all. So maybe I read it so because of my Hungarian, but this is not valid for stormy present. (Perhabs Metatone can comment.) I don't know how it works in Portuguese.

*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.

by DoDo on Fri Feb 3rd, 2006 at 07:21:20 PM EST
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