From time to time we of the POV-Team get bug reports or complaints that are
downright rude and sometimes also insulting. Today we received this doozy which
has to rate as one of the most rude and insulting emails we can recall
receiving this year.

First, a bit of background : 'true' English (i.e. the English language as the
English themselves spell it) uses the 'z' less often than American English.
Words such as 'minimised', 'optimised', etc, are spelt just like that - with an
's' instead of a 'z' (e.g. not 'minimized' or 'optimized').

Over the years, Americans have modified various parts of the English language
to create these variants (another good example is the US 'color' vs the English
'colour'). That's all well and good - we don't dispute the right of Americans
to change the language they speak.

However, POV-Ray is an international effort, and several of the POV authors are
not US residents. These developers generally speak English as the English do,
rather than American English (this is typical of most of the English-speaking
world, outside the USA). This means that software developed by these persons
will often use English, rather than American, spelling, unless they make an
effort to do otherwise.

That's our right and our choice. Almost every English speaker in the world
(outside the USA) knows that there are two ways of spelling some words - the
English way, and the American way.

Unfortunately, it seems that the reverse is not true. We do have, in the POVWIN
help file, a comment to that effect in the very first topic (which obviously
the person whose email is featured below didn't read).

Look at it from our point of view : if we spell something correctly, using the
English spelling, it's only fair that we ought to get peeved if someone writes
to us telling us that we 'don't know how to spell'. Non-American English
speakers would perhaps rightly get a little annoyed if an American tells them
THEY don't know how to spell, when after all it's Americans who changed the
spelling in the first place ! The original English spelling is still valid,
like it or not !

So anyhow, the person whose email to us is excerpted below seems to have the
rather strange belief that if he writes to us and insults us, somehow we'll be
only too pleased to fix the so-called 'bug' (and he did call it a bug) in our
software.

We dashed off a quick reply to him telling him - in no uncertain terms - what
we thought of his idea, but we're posting this here in the hope that some of
his fellow POV Users will also be able to explain this to him in a more
reasoned way (rather then the somewhat annoyed tone of our reply ;)

We also would like to officially nominate Jason Barlow for the 'Rudest Support
Email of 1998' award.

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Return-Path: jas### [at] xmissioncom
From: "Jason Barlow" <jas### [at] xmissioncom>
To: <win### [at] povrayorg>
Subject: Minor Bug...
Date: Thu, 17 Sep 1998 01:03:02 -0600

[request for the following 'bug' to be fixed in version 3.1 deleted]

Whoever is writing  the string/menu resources for  the Windows version is not
very adept with words like optimized, minimized, or customized...all of which
are misspelled: optimised, minimised, and customised in POVray. Bad spelling
is just one of those things that detracts from the professionalism of the
product and makes users question the intelligence of the authors. 

[rest of email deleted]

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He's questioning _our_ intelligence ... ? ;)

-- POV-Ray Webmaster

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