Obviously phoney phish--and a definition of ''native speaker''

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

Could anyone be fooled by the following e-message? The English is clearly not
native in morphology and syntax. In addition, the message was sent on
December 25, when I assume that most of the folks in the billing office at Verizon
were not at work.

Note to T. Paikeday: wouldn't a good definition of ''nonnative'' be 'whatever
features of this discourse are recognizably weird to a monolingual speaker of
English'?


Dear Member:
Thank you for choosing VerizonTM. Unfortunately there was a problem
processing your billing information for the month of December, 2006. Soon
we have changing some servers in our data base for a new service for our
customers. Our number of clients has been growed up very much last month
and for that, was necesary a new aditional data base server, where some
clients are moved in new server.

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org