what we have here is a failure to communicate? Tell you what. Let's make a deal. If I accept half the blame for not expressing myself clearly (or perhaps too clearly since clarity, like compression, so often only confounds) would you be willing to accept the other half for not understanding?

My grandfather beat you by one grade. Made it to the 6th by the skin of his teeth before replacing his own prematurely deceased father in the copper mines as a pre-teen, the same mines that had buried his dad in a collapse and cave-in. Debatable, though, whether he had more common sense than his neighbors. I loved the guy, but he was an ornery, obstinate, obstreperous, opinionated sort--which is part of why I loved him. Wound up clocking his shift boss in the head with his lunchpail which, needless to say, got him sacked on the spot before his first year "below" was out.

I'll say this. If your formal education stopped short of the 5th grade, judging by the quality of your posts, you can only be some sort of auto-didact, as, by the way, was my grandfather. Sterling c.v.'s and fancy credentials are all well and good, but Mark Twain left school after the 5th grade, Herman Melville at 12, and George Bernard Shaw at 14; neither Hemingway nor Dylan Thomas made it past high school; and Scott Fitzgerald was a dismal college dropout. Seems to me you're in good company.