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>> I keep telling my Amiga to "FORMATTE LECTEUR df0: NOM Lancement VITE"
without any positive results…
Perhaps she's offended that you would "tutoyer" her without the proper
introductions. Think "FORMATTEZ…" would do it? 🙂
I don't recall ever having trouble with your use of English as such. Sometimes
when I see someone using a strange combination of words, I might try to
"reverse translate" to try to figure out what is meant. There are celebrated
Pennsylvania Dutch expressions, such as "Throw momma from the train a kiss".
And I once had a letter from a Dutch correspondent who proudly advised me,
"Last week I have become a Honda". (Somebody told him to avoid using the word
"get", and so he threw in the handiest similar phrase he could find).
Reverse translation doesn't always work, of course. There's the apocryphal
story of the technical paper translated by computer into Russian, following
which the Russian text was mechanically translated back to English. In the
final version, readers could not understand the reference to "water buffalo" in
an Engineering paper. When the original text was checked, it turned out to
refer to a hydraulic ram. 🙂
–Jim