Please leave the native speaker's grammar alone because he sure doesn't want to get into any argument and create an ID here to participate in our conversation. If you are pissed, be pissed at English Grammar, not at him. Thanks.
1. understandingly and understandably issue wasn't from the native speaker, but from me. As niteBynite has explained, I have the same understanding. I didn't say it has to be understandingly, but from the context, that's my unerstanding. So UNDERSTANDABLY I pointed it out. If you have regressed to the degree of not even willing to listen to anything from me and blaming everything on the native speaker's "lousy consultancy", I can only say, I am really disappointed.
2. Yesterday I actually confirmed with another native speaker, a coworker, on the "the" issue. She agrees with me, again. Unless "Dentist" is the name of a person, there has to be an "a" or "the". That's my understanding as well. Keep your understanding, no problem! As I said before, I don't want to reinforce my rule or anyone's rule. Again, I brought this up for your attention. If it only pissed you off, I regretting pointing out in the first place.
3. I admire your vocabulary and you masterful use of it. But if you think you are beyond "grammar", you are beyond even "a native speaker's intuition", then why do you still learn English here? Why can some different opinions upset you so much? You told me not to think and write like an ESL writer. I agree it's not good to be obsessed with grammar. Maybe I am obsessed with grammar because grammatically incorrect sentences bother me. But at the same time, it's not like if you think you were not ESL, then you could take a leap and feel so liberated that you can actually write like a native speaker, at least not yet.
That's all I want to say about this issue. now, I know I really need to shut up.
早上本来打算不再说什么了，您要打俺50大板的话，俺就得说说了 2012-09-25 17:55:57 Let me be clear: About the article, wherether it should be there or not, Shark and I were arguing whether "Is this dentist's office" is grammatically correct or not. And he wanted to "fix" my native speaker informant's grammar. It's not about "humor" here. He never said it was intended to be an "ungrammatical" sentence. "understandingly" and "understandably" issue was more understandable now after Shark explained that he intended to depict this person as socially awkward. When I look back at the sentence, he did say "I never knew how to follow a conversion and keep it alive." then " So, I smiled ...". I think if "understandably" is moved closer to the previous sentence, the logic would have been clear. If I had seen "So understandably, I only smiled and remained silent.", it would have made more sense and I wouldn't get confused. But if Shark was trying to write in a "funny" way to achieve this, I guess I just didn't get the humor there.