There are lots of uses of "have" that are not property. "I have many friends," "I have a butcher in town who does great work," "I have 10 employees in my business."

Yes, and those uses would not have triggered my response.

Beyond a token effort to be reasonable in word choice it is not his responsibility to try and hedge against the unforeseeably long tail of potential misinterpretations. Your jump to conclusions response is your responsibility, not his. His language was fine.

I quite clearly indicated that it was just a response and that I was sure that that was just my reading of it.

Don't know about you, but I own all my friends, a butcher and all my employees.

i didn’t downvote but i think “i have {{person}} working for me” is fairly idiomatic american english. that’s why i was confused.

But that's not what it says, it literally says 'we have a Filipino woman, who works for us'. The difference is subtle and that's what made it jump out at me. If it were written the way you just did that likely would not have happened. I assume this is because this isn't my first language even though I use English more than Dutch these days but oddities like that jump out at me likely much more pronounced than they would to someone who is born into the language.

If I had written something to the same effect it would likely have been 'A Filipino woman who works for us' just to avoid that sense of possession, doubly so because of the context.

> it literally says 'we have a Filipino woman, who works for us'.

It _literally_ does not say that. You added a comma which changes the expression.

Apologies, I did not cut-and-paste but wrote it out, that was not intentional, and any change in the expression can be ignored, to me it still reads just the same, I checked my original comment and there I fortunately did get it right.

i was chalking it up to the language difference as well, i was aware that english isn’t your first language. i see what you are saying but for example i have a black engineer who works for me, and he’s one of my best. and neither of us think he is a slave. nobody native speaking english would bat an eye at that sentence even formed that specific way. with the comma though, i would agree with you. it’s subtle.

I figured pointing out that I realized that the OP did not mean what I read into it would pre-empt the ridiculous barrage of follow up comments and pile-ons but that was wishful thinking on my part.

It doesn’t denote property. “I have to go.” Do I own “to go”?

The 'have' in that sentence is not followed by a verb, but by a person.

I have a wife. I have 10 programmers who code for me. I have a mother and father. I have a best friend. I have a guy who mows my lawn.

All of these examples are ‘have’ followed by a person, and none of them imply ownership.

I think this was covered in 7 out of the 9 other comments in this thread already.

Do you feel that your responses to each subsequent comment have added value to this thread? Would editing the your parent comment have been the less selfish approach?

Those in glass houses...

It's time to stop.