Sorry ThatFanficGuy. I thought by your response that you understood the joke. Hence the wink.
You also speak zero Russian. I, on the other hand, am here, conversing with the natives in an almost-fluent way where no one would suspect I'm from anywhere else on the planet. Then I'm given shit over my E being SL because I didn't get a local reference. Dude, get me: I'm not trying to make it seem like you did a bad thing. Your explanation helped. The matter is: I'm supposed to be good at this, with you in particular praising my fluency in plain text. Even if I wasn't, what the fuck does it matter if English is my second language? Does it make me a second-rate speaker all of a sudden? Of course not - and I don't appreciate being treated like one over a small misunderstanding.I know exactly zero jokes or innuendos in Russian.
Hang on there, buddy. Nobody is giving you shit over anything. There is exactly one offended party in this conversation, and the rest of us are backpedalling furiously to figure out why. Tone-wise, "Puns rarely survive ESL" was meant apologetically, not antagonistically. It matters that English is your second language because you've grown up sheep-dipped into a different set of idioms, a different taxonomy of slang, double entendres that are anchored differently and a cultural milieu that contains a different sample-set of touchstones. Here's an entertaining list of things that Americans fucked up when attempting to transliterate slang into foreign languages - the stuff isn't obvious. My understanding was that you didn't get the joke. I was attempting to explain the joke, while also offering a reason as to why you didn't get the joke. I can't stop you from being offended, but I can reiterate that it most assuredly wasn't my intent.
You know, I'm not gonna reply to that right now. I realized that I feel patronized by the remarks about my "good English", and I have no idea why, so I'm gonna give myself some time to think about it. What I'm gonna say is: I know you meant no harm. I've known you long enough to say it even without your explaining yourself.