One of my pet peeves is that organizations assign staff to make public and safety announcements that can't speak intelligible English. Now don't get started on me with that I'm anti-foreigner stuff, because my parents were both foreign born, and they made it their first priority to learn English as soon as they got off the boat. I deal a lot with international clients, and rather than being contemptuous of their halting, rudimentary command of the English language, I admire their ability to do much better in English than I can do in their native tongue. (This Winter I will be embarking on a quest to learn German, my parents' native tongue.) Getting back to the point of this tirade, in my numerous travels I have seen countless examples of people giving public announcements that are unintelligible, even to people like me who make a special effort to carefully listen to foreign born speakers.
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