There are parents that still work hard to overcome the things not taught in school. It's hard work but we do it. My kids sometimes slip into the local style of speaking so we say something like "How do they say it in <fill in a state>?" And for the states from which our nuclear families come, they will respond in that local style.

Then we ask how we say it in "this house", and they reset to how we're trying to teach them to speak. It involves proper grammar, spelling and something like an accent-less manner. Of course everyone else has an accent - not us! There's no free lunch when it comes to spelling. When the school was counseling the kids to go ahead and write and don't care about spelling, we nipped that. And when they started getting bored, we got them into second (and third) languages. Etc.

I have a blackberry and still compose full sentences with punctuation and proper spelling. And it's sometimes really hard - stinking multi-tap rubbish...

As for gracious behavior here - some people are very appreciative, some are black holes, some are downright abusive, and so on. It's a real slice of humanity. I write my responses with a view to the historical value to those who come along later and know how to use the Search feature. I have grown pretty tired of the same old questions with the same old answers so just don't bother.

And a few people who have been one way streets - I have channeled my opinion directly to them and left the rest of the folks alone.

Thank goodness we still live in a country where we can have an opinion and have a choice to participate (or not) as we choose.