Huh. I have the opposite opinion. I'm monolingual English for all intents and purposes but I gathered that opinion from quite a few sources, including:

- We had to take spelling tests in school

- English speakers make (generally light) fun of other's spelling or grammar mistakes in a casual setting

- In a professional setting, a lot of time is taken to proofread our own emails

- There's de jure spellings for every word

- Some online communities are really weird about pointing out grammar and spelling mistakes (namely Reddit)

Language is meant to be a fluid, evolving thing but I always felt like English was treated the opposite way. Maybe that's also why it's the de facto Lingua Franca.

I do think, and hope, that this rigidity will change thanks to AI. I've started to embrace my mistakes. I care a lot less about capitalization and punctuation in my Slack messages, for example.

HA! I guess it's not as enforced as I expected.

A bit of a tangent, but I just want to say how, as a Canadian, I'm getting a lot of joy reading about this restaurant. It's a hilarious facsimile of a Canadian restaurant for a couple reasons:

- There's nothing Canadian about a pancake house. We love pancakes but they aren't really ingrained with our identity. Maple syrup on the other hand, is EXTREMELY important to a lot of Canadians. Serving table syrup instead of real maple syrup is an affront. I found a Reddit thread[1] where a user espouses "tons of free syrup" you were given at RCPH. That's NOT a good thing if you ask me!

- In Canada (and I assume other British Commonwealth countries) you aren't legally allowed to have "Royal" in the name of your business without Royal consent from the Governor General of Canada[2]

Just a bit of Canadiana sparked by your comment I thought I'd share. I always get a kick of the small but conspicuous cultural differences between Canada and USA. They give me that Ingluorious Basterds "number 3" moment.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/newyorkcity/comments/1ajujhi/who_re...

[2] https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/royal-sy...

I agree.

This:

> I suspect that removing half of the bus stops in a city will piss people off and cause even less ridership.

is thrown out but how do we know it's true? That commenter throws it out as their opinion but my opinion is the opposite -- the stated preference will be that people think it's bad but the revealed preference will show even more ridership as travel times improve.

It wasn’t always this way: “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country”