Getting an award for surviving the most boring meeting ever

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yesterday’s Savage Chickens cartoon by Doug Savage (shown above) is titled The Award and is about surviving the most boring meeting ever.

 

How can you plan to not have a boring meeting? There is a brief article by Mithun A. Sridharan on page 6 of the January 2024 issue of Toastmaster magazine titled The 4Ps of Effective Meetings. Those four Ps are Purpose, Product, People, and Process.

 

And there is a 17-page pdf article at Northern Illinois University titled Planning a Great Meeting that originated at The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation but is no longer on their website.

 

You do not really know the Gettysburg Address

 

 

 

 

 

 

A blog post by David Murray at Writing Boots on October 31, 2024 titled You Don’t Know the Gettysburg Address begins:

“The Gettysburg Address was not a ceremonial speech, inevitably bound for a marble wall. It was a strategy speech, designed to ‘convince a very skeptical public in the north that they should keep dying’ despite their doubts about a cause ‘that they didn’t particularly believe in,’ says legendary University of Chicago writing professor Larry McEnerney.”

 

There is a YouTube video of professor Larry McEnerney’s excellent lecture at the World Conference of the Professional Speechwriters Association titled The Gettysburg Address, as You’ve Never Considered It Before. It is an hour and fifteen minutes long – and well worth watching for learning about that great speech. If you can’t spare all that time right now, I suggest you watch the last fifteen minutes which I have bookmarked here.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At 35 minutes he talks about Lincoln’s use of coherence as shown above – going more specific: continent, nation, battlefield, portion, resting place.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At an hour and eight minutes he discusses how dedicate yourself (the call to action) solves three problems.

 

The plaque of the address text came from here at Wikimedia Commons.  

 

I am not going to throw out my black plastic spatula

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the Food Network on October 25, 2024 there is an article by Christine Byrne titled Why you might want to throw away your black plastic kitchen utensils and takeout containers. And there is another article by Kristin Toussaint at Fast Company on November 1, 2024 more emphatically titled Why you should get rid of your black plastic spatula immediately. But there is still another article by Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz at Slate on November 4, 2024 titled I’m not throwing away my black plastic spatula. Potentially toxic flame retardants are a possible problem.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I agree with Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz. The problem here is a difference between a hazard (a potential problem) and a risk (a real problem). Getting bit by a rabid unicorn is a hazard, but the risk is negligible. There is yet another article by Steven Novella at Science-Based Medicine on July 5, 2023 titled Aspartame and Cancer that explains how these two concepts differ:

 

“The difference between hazard and risk is important to understand in terms of this research. A good analogy I often go to is – a shark in a tank is a hazard, meaning that it can potentially cause harm in the right circumstance. But as long as you don’t swim in the tank with the shark, the risk is zero. Something happening chemically may be a hazard, but we need to know how the substance is metabolized, will it get to the target tissue and in what dose, and what compensatory mechanisms are there? A potential hazard can be of zero risk depending on exposure.”

 

Some memories of the Air Force Reserve - for Veterans Day

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In spring 1972 I enlisted in the Air Force Reserve to be a medic - before the Army could draft me. That meant I would first be on active duty, and then have reserve duty for six years: one weekend every month and two weeks during the summer. So, I spent the second half of that year on active duty. First was basic training in San Antonio. Early one morning the son of a Chief Master Sergeant (the highest enlisted rank) told me his father’s favorite joke:

 

“What is the difference between the Air Force and the Boy Scouts? The Boy Scouts have adult leadership.”

 

Then I had tech school in Wichita Falls. Finally, I had on the job training in a hospital near St. Louis.

 

In 1973 I started graduate school at Carnegie Mellon University. I also was working for one weekend a month as a reserve medic in the clinic out at the Greater Pittsburgh Airport that was part of the 911th Tactical Airlift Group. Most of my job was helping do the annual flight physicals. That meant I did tasks like eye tests, hearing tests, blood pressures, pulse rates, electrocardiograms, and even footprints.

 

From 1973 until 1975 on paper I belonged to a unit called the 911th Mobility Support Squadron. It is jargon meaning replacement troops, and had the acronym MSS. No vowel you add to make it pronounceable looks good. I vote for mess. You may remember the 1988 movie Bull Durham about a minor league baseball team. Kevin Costner plays the veteran catcher Crash Davis who just has been sent to the Durham Bulls to balance out a trade. When he walks into the team manager’s office the manager scowls and asks, Who are you? He introduces himself by replying that he is just the player to be named later. My reserve unit felt like that. We were only a minor league team. Morale always was near zero. If I did not have to be there, I would have preferred to be somewhere else.

 

In July 1975 I was told I had been reassigned. Now I belonged to the 758th Tactical Airlift Squadron. I walked up the hill to the base operations building to sign in with my new unit before going to work. When I went in, I noticed that everyone was smiling. They all were happy to be there. Their Admin sergeant welcomed me. His first five words were that: we are all professionals here.

 

Before I headed down the hill to work at the clinic, I needed to stop and use the bathroom. What I saw there amazed me. Inside the toilet stall door, under a clear plastic cover, was a sheet of paper listing exactly what each aircrewman (pilot, copilot, and flight mechanic) had to do to handle an in-flight nightmare – having one of the two piston engines on the plane fail. The title read Don’t just sit there; have an accident. As I washed my hands I looked around and saw that the same emergency procedures also were posted on the wall above every urinal. I thought, wow, these guys are really serious.

 

The 758th flew a twenty-year-old cargo plane called the C123K. If you saw the movie Con Air then you have seen one. It looks like the one shown above.  It has a high straight wing with two piston engines, and a fuselage shaped like a pig. It carries 15 tons of cargo or up to sixty troops The C123K was not pressurized, and wasn’t really even watertight. It has a wimpy official name - the Provider.

 

But the C123K had a secret. Under the wings there also were a pair of auxiliary jet engines. Their added thrust could get the plane into the air from a very short dirt runway. It also could keep the plane flying normally with one piston engine completely shut off. The Air Force had a series of jet fighters whose names started with the powerful word Thunder: the F-84 Thunderjet and Thunderstreak, and the F-105 Thunderchief. So the 758th renamed their plane the mighty Thunderpig.

 

The 758th had adult leadership. They believed in personal empowerment. Treat all your people like adults and give them room to blossom. Tell them what needs to be done, and let them work as a team to get it done. Other than emergency procedures you don’t need to spell out exactly how.

 

Now, that was not the typical attitude in Pittsburgh back then. Mostly you got arrogant management butting heads with powerful unions like the United Steelworkers, the USW.  Loadmasters in the 758th were a burly, boisterous, bunch of Polish-American sergeants who worked as hammersmiths over at a USW forge shop. Most were almost in the same shape as back when they had played high school football. They were proud of their reserve unit and treated it like it was their football team.     

 

Eighteen months later I watched the 758th accept an award – the Grover Loening Trophy for best flying unit in the Air Force Reserve. Here is one reason why. One of their planes was flying low at night with a full load of Army Rangers getting ready for a paratroop drop. The ramp and door on the back of the plane already were wide open when one engine sputtered and then quit. They began to lose altitude rapidly. The crew feathered the propeller, started up the auxiliary jets and the mighty Thunderpig climbed and got them home safely. A less skilled crew probably would have crashed and killed all 45 people aboard.  

 

Personal empowerment comes in all sorts of places. I found it in an Air Force Reserve unit. Which unit does your workplace resemble more, the Mobility Support Squadron (a mess) or that Tactical Airlift Squadron? Could you help change it?

 

An image of a C123K came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

Overblown claims about fears from investigators for the 2024 Chapman Survey of American Fears

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On October 24, 2024 I blogged about how In the tenth Chapman Survey of American Fears for 2024, public speaking only was ranked #59 of 85 fears at 29.0% There is a pdf article titled Chapman Survey of American Fears 2024 – Key Findings that contains the following statement:

 

“ ‘More interesting, really, than what is in the top 10 list, is how the overall level of fear changes. For example, in the 2015 survey, only the top one, Corrupt Government Officials, had more than 50% reported afraid or very afraid. By the time you get to 2018, all 10 are over 50%. Americans are more afraid of everything,’ said Ed Day, Associate Professor of Sociology.”

 

 

    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The above statement refers to percent and thus to more Americans being afraid, NOT Americans being more afraid. But, as shown above in 2018 there were 12 fears ranked at 50% or above. In 2019 there were 17. The number of fears rises sharply from 2016 to 2019. Then for 2020/2021 there only were 9, in 2022 there were 11, in 2023 there were only 7, and in 2024 there were 15. Similar trends (also shown above) appear when we look either at 40% or above, and 30% or above.  

 

Their discussion of Corruption says:

 

“Since the inception of the Chapman Survey of American Fears, Fear of Corrupt Government Officials (hereafter, FOC) has been the leading fear Americans reported. That is a striking fact because the surveys have spanned a decade and three presidential administrations. In the tenth wave of the survey conducted in 2024, 65.2% of Americans said that they were afraid or very afraid of corrupt government officials up more than 5% since 2023. FOC peaked at 79.6% in 2020/2021 and then declined to current levels.” 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

See their graphic, to which I have added about the Trump administration.

 

Another article by Andre Mouchard (of the Orange County Register) published at MedicalExpress on October 28, 2024 is incorrectly titled Survey finds Americans more afraid today than at any time in history. It contains the following quotes:

 

“ ‘Fear is taking a larger and larger role in American life,’ said Chistopher Bader, a sociology professor at Chapman who has been involved in ‘American Fears’ since the beginning.

 

‘They’re afraid of more things than they used to be,’ he said.

 

‘And they’re more afraid of those things than they used to be.’….

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But the overall number of fears (shown above) has ranged from 79 on 2016 to 97 in 2023. That number of questions asked is a choice made by investigators which varies, as does the sample size from about 1000 to 1500 (also shown above).  

 

Also:

 

“ ‘Stranger danger is growing,’ Bader said, referring to data that shows Americans – once viewed as optimistic and welcoming – are increasingly afraid of people they don’t know.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But strangers were ranked between 73rd and 91st in the surveys, as shown above. Further, the percent very afraid or afraid of strangers only ranged from 7% in 2018 to 16.7% in 2024.

 

What are Americans really more afraid of? To evaluate that we need to look at Fear Scores on a scale from one to four, where 1 = Not Afraid, 2 = Slightly Afraid, 3 = Afraid, and 4 = Very Afraid. I blogged about this back on October 30, 2015 in a post titled According to the 2015 Chapman Survey of American Fears, adults are slightly less than Afraid of federal government corruption and only Slightly Afraid of Public Speaking.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As shown above, the Fear Score for Corrupt Government Officials ranged from 2.611 in 2015 to 3.175 (more than Afraid) in 2020/21. The Fear Score for Public Speaking ranged from 1.909 in 2017 to 2.172 in 2022 (more than Slightly Afraid). And the Fear Score for Strangers only ranged from 1.488 in 2018 to 1.750 in 2024.

 

Your impromptu speech topic is in the bag. Put your hand in there and feel, but don’t look.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Table Topics is the impromptu speaking portion of a Toastmasters club meeting. Last night at the Pioneer Toastmasters Club meeting in Boise Brian Reublinger (DTM) was the Table Topics Master. He had a row of numbered paper lunch bags. Participants picked a number and got one. Then they were to put a hand inside and feel the object there, but not look at it until after giving their one-to-two-minute speech.

 

I had never seen that type of question before. But it was described by Central Valley Toastmasters Club in an article titled 50 Fun Table Topics:

 

“#12

Have an object in a bag that the Table Topics speaker has to feel and describe to the club. The club then guesses what was described. Alternatively, the respondent may look at the object before describing it.”

 

And it is a variation on one described by Mark Lavergne at District 6 Toastmasters in another article titled 101 Ideas for Great Table Topics:

 

“ ’Whatchamacallit’ #3 – Trust Your Feelings

Table Topics respondents are given an opportunity reach into a bag of assorted objects and pick an object to feel. The respondent leaves the object in the bag and describes it merely by feel.”

 

 

What mix of happiness and unhappiness do you have?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Recently I have been reading the 2023 book by Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey titled Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier. (There is a brief preview at Google Books). On page 14 they explain that:

 

“We all have our own natural mix of happiness and unhappiness, depending on our circumstances and character, and our job is to use the mix we’re given to best effect. The first task in doing that is learning where, in fact, we are.

 

One way to get evidence of your natural happy-unhappy mix is by measuring your levels of positive and negative affect – mood – and how they compare to others’ using the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule, or PANAS.”

 

That schedule is described by Brooks in a pdf article titled LESSON TOPIC: Positive Affect and Negative Affect. (There also is a Wikipedia page). You rank twenty different emotions on a scale from one to five where 1 = very slightly or not at all; 2 = a little; 3 = moderately; 4 = quite a bit; and 5 = extremely.

 

And on pages 16 to 18 of the book they elaborate that:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Unless you are the highly unusual person who is right at the average on both positive (about 35) and negative (about 18), you will fall into one of four quadrants, as illustrated in Figure 1. If you have above-average positive affect and above-average negative affect, you’re one of the ‘Mad Scientists,’ who are always spun up about something. If you’re below-average positive and below-average negative, you’re a sober and cool ‘Judge.’ ‘Cheerleaders,’ with above-average positive and below-average negative, celebrate the good in everything and don’t dwell on the bad. ‘Poets,’ who register below-average positive and above-average negative, have trouble enjoying good things, and always know when there is a threat lurking.

 

We know, we know: you wish you were in the cheerleader quadrant. But we can’t all be cheerleaders, and the world needs the other profiles as well. On a moment’s reflection, you’ll likely realize that it would be a nightmare if everyone saw only the bright side of everything, because we’d keep making the same mistakes again and again. Poets are valuable for their perspective and creativity. (And everyone looks great in a black turtleneck.) Life is more interesting with Mad Scientists in the mix. And Judges keep us all from blowing ourselves up with impulsive ideas.

 

You have a unique role to play in life. Your profile is a gift. But no matter what that profile is, you have room to increase the happiness in your life. To do that, you have to understand your natural happiness blend, manage yourself, and then play to your strengths. For example, let’s say you are a Mad Scientist. You will tend to react very strongly, good and bad, to things in your life. This might make you the life of the party, but it can exhaust your loved ones and coworkers. You need to know this, and work to manage your strong emotions and reactions.

 

Maybe you are a Judge. You are cool as a cucumber, and perfect for jobs like surgeon or spy (or anything in which keeping your head is an advantage – like raising teenagers). But with friends and loved ones, you might seem a little too unenthusiastic at times. This knowledge can be useful so that you work to muster a little more passion than comes naturally, for the sake of others.

 

Or perhaps you are a Poet. When everyone says everything’s great, you say, ‘Not so fast.’ This is important, because it can literally or figuratively save lives – Poets see problems before others do. But it can make you pessimistic and hard to be around at times, and you can tend toward melancholy. You need to learn how to brighten up your assessments and not catastrophize.

 

Even a Cheerleader needs emotional self-management. Everyone loves being a Cheerleader, but keep in mind that you will probably avoid bad news and have a hard time delivering it. That’s not always a good thing! You will need to work on that so you can give people the truth, see things accurately in life, and not say everything is going to be all right when it just isn’t true.

 

Learning your PANAS profile – your natural blend of happy and unhappy feelings- can help you get happier because it indicates how to manage your tendencies, but in separating the two sides, it also points out vividly that your happiness does not depend on your unhappiness. The PANAS test is empowering, because using it, many people understand themselves for the first time, and see that there is nothing weird or wrong with them. For example, some people go for many years thinking they are defective because they experience more negative feelings than others around them, and have a hard time mustering as much enthusiasm as others. They learn that they are simply Poets. And the world needs Poets.”  

 

On January 19, 2024 I blogged about The joy of 2x2 tables, or charts, or matrices.

 

The cartoon was adapted from one at Openclipart.

 

What is the history of books that defined our English vocabulary over the past 500 years?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have been enjoying skimming through a large book which I found on the new books shelves at my friendly local public library. It is a 2024 book by Bryan A. Garner and Jack Lynch with a long title -  Hardly Harmless Drudgery: A 500-Year Pictorial History of the Lexicographic Geniuses, Sciolists, Plagiarists & Obsessives Who Defined the English Language. The list price is $65.

 

Their Introduction opens by stating:

 

“Samuel Johnson – creator of not the first English dictionary, but perhaps of the first great one – wickedly mocked his own trade when he defined lexicographer as ‘a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.’ But dictionaries are serious business, and the people who drudge away at them are anything but harmless. This book tells the stories of the most important English-language dictionaries and their makers.

 

Dictionaries are repositories of erudition, monuments to linguistic authority, and battlefields in cultural and political struggles. They have been announced with almost messianic fervor, decried as evidence of cultural collapse, and relied on in judicial decisions. They are works of almost superhuman endurance, produced by people who devote themselves to years or even decades of wearisome labor. As commodities in a fiercely competitive publishing business, they also can keep a company afloat for generations or sink it in a few years. Some also are beautiful objects, products of genuine innovations in typography and book design.”

 

Their chapters about Noah Webster and his critics were most interesting to me. Chapter 57 (page 177) is titled Noah Webster at His Most Compendious, and discusses his two-column 1806 Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. You can find a pdf of it at the Internet Archive. Chapter 62 (page 199) on Noah Webster’s Deeply Flawed Magnum Opus begins:

 

“Although Noah Webster produced his compact, one-volume Compendious Dictionary in 1806, this big two-volume work earned him the title Father of the American Dictionary. Released in November 1828, it was an important declaration of American identity, heralding the nation’s linguistic independence from Great Britain. It marked the biggest milestone in English lexicography between Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) and the OED [Oxford English Dictionary] (1928).

 

But even with a modest press run of 2,500 copies, retailing for $20 apiece, it failed to sell out over the next 13 years. The price was too high for most potential customers.

 

Webster’s achievement was remarkable in several respects. His wordlist, for instance, was much more comprehensive than that of earlier dictionaries. If we take the span of entries from la to laird, Webster provides 141 entries as compared to Johnson’s 84. Some 17% of his headwords – 12,000 of the total of 70,000 – hadn’t appeared in earlier dictionaries. He had mined the resources of American English to include such words as caucus, electioneer, parachute, revolutionize, safety-valve, skunk, tomahawk, and wampum. He developed his own system of recording pronunciations, which required him to have a new typeface cut to distinguish the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sounds of C and G.

 

Webster’s definitions, too, were generally superior to those of his predecessors. Like Johnson, he was a splitter, identifying multiple meanings of most words and breaking them out with numbered senses. His definitions were also abundantly clear. Consider the entry for mortgage. Johnson had defined it as ‘a dead pledge: a thing put into the hands of a creditor.’ For most readers, that’s wholly unenlightening. Webster provides an etymology,’Fr. mort, dead, and gage, pledge,’ and continues ‘Literally a dead pledge; the grant of an estate in fee as security for the payment of money, and on the condition that if the money shall be paid according to the contract, the grant shall be void, and the mortgage shall re-convey the estate to the mortgager’….”

 

Webster also included American spellings, as is discussed in another article in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary titled Noah Webster’s spelling wins and fails. His lack of consistency was attacked by Lyman Cobb, who is discussed in Chapter 64 (page 211) titled Lyman Cobb – Walker’s Promoter, Webster’s Tormentor. You can find Cobb’s entire 56-page pamphlet at Google Books.

 

There is a 54-minute podcast by Ron Lombard at WCNY PBS on June 12, 2024 titled Firebarn Chats, Episode 2 – The authors of “Hardly Harmless Drudgery”

 

The cartoon boy reading was adapted from here at Openclipart.

 

Finding speech topics in unusual places – like a Learning Express article about 525 writing prompts in the New York Times

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The November 2024 issue of Toastmaster magazine has an article by Mackenzie Eldred on pages 26 and 27 titled Finding Speech Topics in Unusual Places. Her seven examples are:

 

Mail Problems

Burger Love

The Chicken Soup of Life

Finding Speech Inspiration on the Flight Deck

Lessons From the Attic

Reaching the Summit

Reflecting on My Hair Journey

 

But there is more unusual place to look. It is a Learning Network article at the New York Times which was updated on August 2, 2023, titled 525 Prompts for Narrative and Personal Writing. There are 37 categories. This article is a gigantic collection of speech topic ideas! And when you click on a prompt, you are taken to a brief Learning Network article – a starting point for your research. I blogged about it in a post on May 15, 2024 titled My workshop presentation at the 2024 District 15 Toastmasters Conference on May 18, 2024 about Creating or Finding Great Table Topics Questions.

 

The cartoon was adapted from one at Openclipart.