National stereotypes

As a Brit, I wonder if there are also Americans who roll around laughing when they discover FranklinCovey’s Mission Builder (”Use our Mission Builder exercise to add focus, direction, and a sense of purpose to your daily decisions”). I suspect not, because whereas Brits usually look at me as if I have suddenly produced a bloodstained axe from under my coat when, post-walk, I mention the word “evaluation”, Americans seem comfortable with the practice and sometimes seem to believe that doing an evaluation has somehow improved the walk they have just completed.

I wonder also whether (and how) you can identify the nationality of the writer of the following excerpt:

Source here. How did you do?

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Comments

1. MM sez:
   10 October 2004 at 10:41 AM

   The only thing that particularly strikes me is the ‘has wondered’. I would have expected ‘is wondering’ or ‘has been wondering’. Are there any other features that strike you?

2. Geoff sez:
   10 October 2004 at 1:51 PM

   He doesn’t write like an English native speaker, so … he must be an Albertan. (Btw, whence comes the stupid dogma that you should only produce in a language which is your mother tongue? How much (good) Latin would not have been written if that rule had been applied before translation mafias got going?)

3. The German-English Translator sez:
   9 November 2004 at 6:01 AM The “baldie”
   The

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