[CentOS] kernel LANG option

One thing that irritates me is that I'll copy something from a site in ff
and paste it into webmail (squirrel/ensign, if that matters); then, in the
evening, when I want to forward it to one or more of my lists, using
t-bird, I have to clean it up *all* the time: 2-3 characters replacing ",'
and -. I can't seem to find anything in either the webmail options (which
I have set to plain text), or kde (thinking of the buffer it's held in),
to affect this. I'm googling, but haven't seen what the effect of changing
the kernel line in /boot/grub/grub.conf from en_US.UTF-8 to, say, en_US,
or maybe even, if that's an option, ASCII....

Anyone know?

       mark, almost ready to install and play with a friend from a techie
mailing
                list's email tool, running on top of mutt....