Etsy: it's not just a US/English-speaking site, yo.

Whoops, posted this too soon--left the text out initially. Although really, the subject line says it all, except maybe I should replace "Etsy" with "The Internet."

EtsyFAST, and no doubt other support groups for Etsy business owners, gets a fair amount of questions regarding potential scams. And there are a lot of scams, especially the classic "wire transfer" scam where the person convo-ing you will say they want to buy an expensive item, but they want to buy it outside of Etsy, and they'll send you extra money, so can you deposit their money order and refund them the rest...oh dear.

It's true that many of these overtures feature poorly-written English. It's just one of those observable things, aside from any assumptions or beliefs about broken English that we tend to have in English-speaking countries. But something that gets overlooked in discussions of these potential scam overtures is that "broken English" does not automatically equal "dishonest." Some of these e-mails have actually turned out to be from people unable to communicate fluently in written English, and/or who were unfamiliar with Etsy's rules about purchasing or basic netiquette. They were honest customers, trying in good faith to contact someone about an item. It really does happen.

I don't know how to put this in a way that's clear. Maybe someone practiced in dissecting the privilege that native English-speakers carry around would have better ways to put this, ways that acknowledge the prevalence of broken English in real scam e-mails while also pointing out less insulting ways to talk about that. I wonder how Etsy sellers and customers who don't speak English fluently, or who speak it as a second (or third, or fourth...) language, must feel when they see people say things like, "The first hint that this convo is a scam is that it's in broken English!" That probably feels really crummy and weird.

And you know, as someone who works in public and academic libraries, and who sees people who have had it seriously Rough returning to school after a lifetime of being shorted by an educational system that gave up on them, or of not being able to concentrate on, say, learning how to write professionally because they were too busy living hand-to-mouth...I feel a little creeped-out when I hear people denigrate folks with poor written language skills. I help people every day whose written English is pretty bad, almost as bad as if they'd grown up speaking a different language. They're not bad people; chances are they've had a much rougher life than many of us polished writers have.

Come to think of it, there's plenty of native English speakers on the internet, accepted members of their communities etc., who don't exactly write like Austen, you know?

So the automatic assumptions and the hostility, in light of all that, are what gets me. It's just creepy. And I think it's not only about identifying a common trait in scam messages. I think there's something there about language and privilege, too, and I think that's not cool.

The End.