Could this be a clue? Found this partial definition:

"charade : n 1: a composition that imitates somebody's style in a humorous way [syn: parody, lampoon, spoof, sendup, mockery, takeoff, burlesque, travesty, pasquinade, put-on]"

Cool. Thanks, Wrighton :)

OK, Pierre, to make it perfectly clear...

We're considering, I gather, the sentence, "My dad is work at home." This sentence is grammatically incorrect.

Either sentence you suggested as an alternative is grammatically correct.

Oh, yes.

Apparently the "cat" in question is not a lovely animal that used to be a kitten, but is really the ancient punishment whip known as the "cat o' nine tails." This whip was one of the favorite weapons with which sailing ship and pirate captains and officers kept discipline among their rough, hard-bitten, often unwilling crew members.

When the punishment was inflicted, the accused seaman would be tied to a mast in an open space on deck where there was "enough room to swing a cat."

Speaking practically, the best thing you can do is what the customer insists upon. But have one of your co-workers in the room with you when you capitulate, so that the customer cannot come back later on and blame you for the error.

I mean "pronunciation," natch... still have not had my coffee this morning...

Glenn: "Everyone" is not debating punctuation. I was simply attempting to answer Michelle's question.

Dave: Love your last para...very good breakdown of the right way to look at this... however, you may want to substitute "both can be considered correct" for "neither is correct," as you don't mean to say "either is incorrect." lol.

Your name is Daisuke? Ooohh. I seem to have assumed it was pronounced "diskie." Sorry. :)

This is pertinent, though. Any native speaker seems inclined, from habit or ignorance, to read or hear new words as if they were words in his native language. To make matters worse, the new foreign words get mangled again in speech. To make matters even worse than that, peculiar sociological reasons exist why an exogenous word might be deliberately mispronounced.

(Texan provincial in question reflects that if she just spoke that last sentence to a bunch of her fellow Americans, they might think it was a foreign language anyway. You guys do not know how fluent you really are.)

Here's an illustration: Here in Houston, you might say, "Mr. Cardenas [Car Day Nahs], go towards downtown on San Felipe [San Feh Lee Pay] until you get to Post Oak, then turn left." Or you might hear one of our cowboys in a business suit say, "Cardeenis, go ta town on Sin Flippy till ya git ta Postek, en take uh lay uff."

Cowboy in the first place has a Texas oilfield accent so thick he needs his secretary to translate for him. In the second place, he's used to thinking of Hispanics as lower-class immigrants and therefore does not take care in pronouncing Spanish words. In the third place, he doesn't associate Post Oak with a kind of tree; it's just a street name (is there even one post oak along Post Oak?).

Dyske, I think Japanese is unusual in that respect. Whenever I've come across the names of countries in a "teach yourself" language book, or whenever I've seen a country name in print in a non-English language, it seems that the name of any country is almost always a word unique to the writer's language.

Someone else asked this question here: http://www.usenews.org/group/rec.travel.europe/message-316106.html Also check this out: http://www.multi-lingual-atlas.com/ It covers only Europe, but it gives you some idea of what all the countries of Europe are called in each others' languages.

Why is this so of European languages and not Japanese? I don't know, but I can guess.
Back in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when commerce and diplomacy were getting sophisticated, educated people and merchants commonly spoke many other languages besides their own. However, they were very much in the minority. The common people, who rarely spoke more than their home language, all stuck with their traditional names for other countries, many of which tended to mean "that land where the people we call ___ live." So it was the traditional names that stayed.

From what I understand of Japanese history, Japan was closed to outsiders until quite recently (in a historical sense). When Europeans did enter Japan, they did so from quite a few different countries, and it seems natural that Japanese people would refer to the homes of the visitors by the names the visitors used themselves. Your word "honor" is telling... I think that just as Japanese noblemen would never pick a name for another person and use that instead of a person's own name, they would never have thought of making up a name for someone else's homeland when the real name was available to use. Then, later, when the borders were opened and diplomatic relations were established with the rest of the world all at once, there probably wouldn't have been time to establish brand new country names unique to Japanese.

I deeply apologize if my ignorance of history has led me to say anything wrong about your country. But I did think of a question for you--In Japan, you have quite a few subdivisions of the country--I believe they are called "prefectures" in English. These divisions seem to be very old... one centers on Tokyo and another on Osaka, for example. Are there historical names for each prefecture that are used by the people who live there, that are not usually used by other Japanese people?

Damn! I am so provincial. Of COURSE many of the United States are former English possessions (and it's there that you find the greatest acceptance of the I pronunciation in this country). Texas was never an English possession, though :)