You're Welcome

Forgive me, but I have to purge.

Imagine you are an English teacher. Perhaps you teach at an Italian highschool. You are obviously not a native speaker, but you should be able to cover the basics right?

After you introduce the alphabet (yep, the English alphabet is different to the Italian one as ours has 26 letters and theirs only 21...missing J, K, W, X & Y) and some numbers perhaps you'd teach standard polite phrases. You know - Hello, How are you? What's your name? My name's...? And you'd cover please, thank you and .....'not at all'. What?

Now perhaps it's a reflection of American English infiltrating Australian English (because let's face it Australian English is different to UK and US English), but surely everyone should learn 'You're welcome'. It's internationally recognised as a standard polite response to 'thank you'.

Sure there a several other options available including 'Don't mention it', 'My pleasure' and more colloquially 'No problem' or even more so 'No worries mate'. But 'You're welcome' is pretty much okay everywhere.

But no, I have had two students argue with me (yep argue) that 'You've welcome' is incorrect.

Why? Well, some random Italian high school teachers have told them that 'Welcome' translates to only benvenuto as in 'Welcome aboard' and it's not to be used after 'Thank You'. I don't mind that students don't necessarily know (although at intermediate levels I am somewhat shocked) and am happy to inform and teach, but I do mind the arguing. It's the blatant 'you're wrong, definitely wrong' comment with a defiant wave of the hands that gets up my skirt.

The insult was only compounded by the fact that I know that both of these students have travelled, and have needed to speak English during their travels. Surely, they can't have met only rude, ignorant people in English speaking lands who only use the very formal, very British 'Not at all' ?

Then there is the little matter of trying to explain to Italians how important the use of 'please' is. They just don't get it really. They think it's unnecessary, and then whinge about the fact that they were refused service at a pub because they asked for a beer without a please attached to the end of the request. Or that the woman selling bus tickets got snappy because they didn't use 'please'.

Let's not even go there.