Randall Munroe’s humorous xkcd comic (shown above in my colorized version) from December 19, 2025 is simply titled Pole Vault Pole. The second one has a profile which resembles the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. An accompanying web page at Explain Xkcd notes all the rules say is that:
“The pole may be of any material or combination of materials and of any length or diameter, but the basic surface must be smooth."
There is a useful and brief article at Speakeasy on August 1, 2025 that is titled Crisis Communication Strategies Every Executive Should Master. Their nine strategies are to:
1] Stay Centered and Project Calm
2] Communicate Early and Often
3] Be Human and Empathetic
4] Deliver a Clear, Unified Message
5] Prepare Spokespeople Across the Leadership Team
6] Address Internal and External Audiences Separately
7] Build and Practice Your Plan Before a Crisis Hits
8] Strengthen Public Speaking Confidence
9] Listen as Part of the Strategy
An article by Ted Johnson at Deadline on December 17, 2025 is titled Donald Trump used primetime address to insist “inflation is stopped” and “prices are down” – and to blame much on Joe Biden. It says:
“He also talked of reducing prescription drug prices by 400% to 600%, defying mathematics.”
As is shown above, if we extrapolate beyond the 100% decrease which makes sense, a 200% reduction means the seller would instead nonsensically pay the buyer the full price. A 400% reduction fraudulently means the seller would pay the buyer 3 times the price - and a 600% reduction means the seller would pay the buyer 5 times the price. But that’s not the first time Trump made these very silly statements. Another article by Bruce Y. Lee at Forbes on August 2, 2025 is titled Trump Says He Will Get Drug Prices Down By 500% to 1500%.
Yesterday I was looking at a post on the Gem State Patriot News blog on December 14, 2025 by retired surgeon Dr. John Livingston which is titled The Seed We Choose to Grow.
His seventh paragraph states that:
“A recent Psychology Today article offers a more secular explanation; put plainly: ‘Self-hatred often leads to outward hate. People who loathe themselves frequently project that inner contempt onto others, seeing them through a lens of criticism and disdain. The result is a harmful feedback look, where internal struggles manifest as hostility, and hostility in turn deepens the internal turmoil. Hate becomes both the symptom and the fuel.’ “
But he does not provide a link to that article, or say who wrote it, or when it was published in that magazine, or what the title was. I tried Google searching for some of the sentences in his ‘quote’ and came up empty. My conclusion is that he instead just is paraphrasing from who knows where.
I previously wrote about John in a post on October 22, 2024 titled How not to write a blog post (or speech) using a quotation. He is so careless a writer that you never can rely on the contents of his blog posts.
On October 29, 2025 I blogged about What makes a speaker charismatic? The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines charisma as:
“a personal magic of leadership arousing special popular loyalty or enthusiasm for a public figure (such as a political leader).”
And a further explanation there is that:
“The Greek word charisma means ‘favor’ or ‘gift.’ It comes from the verb charizesthai (‘to favor’), which in turn comes from the noun charis, meaning ‘grace.’ In English, charisma was originally used in Christian contexts to refer to a gift or power bestowed upon an individual by the Holy Spirit for the good of the Church – a sense that is now very rare. These days, we use the word to refer to social, rather than divine, grace. For instance, a leader with charisma may easily gain popular support, and a job applicant with charisma may shine in an interview.”
But the Cambridge Dictionary says that both the Italian and Spanish spellings omit the unpronounced letter ‘h.’ If you play with words like me, then this spelling suggests a bogus derivation from the word ‘car’ and that more than carisma would be called truckisma, as shown above via a cartoon.
Cartoons of a car and truck both came from OpenClipArt.
Way back on August 4, 2009 I blogged about Mind mapping and idea mapping for planning speeches. More recently there is an article on SpeakerHUB at Medium from August 25, 2023 titled How to use mind maps for public speaking. They list the following ten steps:
1] Choose your main concept
2] Create your branches
3] Fill out each branch
4] Structure your presentation
5] Create your presentation (branch by branch)
6] Check your presentation against the mind map
7] Practice the presentation
8] Make any changes that are required
9] Perform the presentation
10] Review your performance
There is a more general article by Sejla Hajric at CRM.org on May 27, 2025 titled All 10 Different Types of Mind Map You Need to Know About. Only the last one is specifically for a presentation. Those are:
1) Tree map (hierarchical, tree-like structure)
2) Flow map (flow chart with a sequence of steps)
3) Dialogue map (visual representation of a discussion)
4) Spider map (radiating out to subtopics)
5) Multi-flow map (multiple flows representing causes or effects)
6) Bubble map (describing a topic with adjectives)
7) Double bubble map (two central bubbles rather than one)
8) Tunnel timeline map (representing processes linearly over time)
9) Circle map (where topic information radiates from a center)
10) Presentation map (used for topics in public speaking)
And there is a very detailed (10-page .pdf) article by Atiyeh Sadat Sajadi et al in the Journal of Education and Health Promotion on December 28, 2024 titled Using the mind map method in medical education, its advantages and challenges: A systematic review. Their Figure 2 is shown above.
The third and fourth paragraph in their Introduction state:
“The mind map is an innovative learning method that increases student participation and consequently leads to meaningful learning. For the first time in the mid-1970s, Tony Buzan introduced the mind map method. In this learning method, a graphical image can be designed with the help of words, images, colors, and symbols, so that the student can remember the material more easily. In fact, the mind map is a visual educational method in which the main topic is in the middle of the page and ideas, words, pictures, symbols, etc. are placed around it in a branching and free-form manner. In the mind map, long texts are removed, which allows the user to synthesize, creates the best arrangement of information, increases the level of cooperation and participation within and between groups, and ultimately promotes ideation and critical thinking.
The mind map actually expresses the relationship between attitudes and ideas that are described visually. The use of this method has caused medical students to memorize a large amount of information for a longer period of time and accelerate the learning process. As a result, the success of students increases. The hemispheres of the brain have different functions, and these functions can be implemented in a unified way. Employing mind maps results in an elevated degree of cerebral hemisphere functionality. This approach arranges thoughts, establishes connections between ideas and perspectives, and offers a means to uncover novel subjects that can fortify existing notions and concepts. In essence, this method hinges on connecting a central idea to multiple sub-ideas.”
Back in 1972 the Italian author Gianni Rodari (1920 to 1980) published a book titled Grammatica della fantasia. Earlier this year an English translation of it by Jack Zipes was published with the title of The Grammar of Fantasy: An introduction to the art of inventing stories. I particularly enjoyed reading the eighth chapter on pages 70 to 73 which is titled The Arbitrary Prefix:
“One way to make words productive, in a fantastic sense, is to deform them. Children do this for fun, spontaneously, in games, which also have a serious side, because it helps them to explore the possibilities of words, to master them, by pushing them into new variations. Games, that is, stimulate their freedom as ‘speakers,’ with a right to their own personal words (thank you, Monsieur Saussure). Such play encourages nonconformity in children.
The arbitrary prefix was developed in keeping with the spirit of these games, and I have frequently made good use of it myself.
The prefix un- is enough to transform the word ‘penknife’ – a negligible, everyday object that might yet be dangerous and aggressive – into an ‘unpenknife,’ a fantastic and pacifist object that doesn’t sharpen pencils, but allows their tips to grow back when they wear down. Naturally, this would enrage stationery store owners and the ideological champions of consumerism. There are sexual allusions here, too, that are very well concealed but are nonetheless still perceivable by children, albeit subconsciously.
The same prefix gives us ‘coat unhanger,’ the opposite of a ‘coat hanger.’ A ‘coat unhanger’ isn’t used to hang clothes up, but rather drops them off, shedding clothes whenever they are needed. All of this takes place in a country where the shop windows do not have glass, stores do not have cash registers, and coat checks do not require claim tickets. We’ve gone straight from a prefix to utopia itself. But its’s certainly not forbidden to imagine a city in the future where coats are free as water or air. And utopia is just as educational as the critical spirit. All that’s needed is to transfer utopia from the world of the intellect (to which Antonio Gramsci rightly ascribes methodical pessimism) to that of the will (whose principle characteristic, tates Gramsci, must be optimism). In sum, even the coat hanger, as such, is only a ‘paper tiger.’
I also invented a country with un- in front of it, where there is an ‘uncannon’ that is used to ‘undo’ war, rather than wage it. The ‘sense of nonsense’ (this expression was coined in Italian by Alfonso Gatto) appears to me to be transparent in this case.
The prefix bi- gives us the ‘bipen,’ which writes everything doubly (and perhaps is useful for twin students). There is also the ‘bipipe’ for smokers who want double the pleasure, and the ‘bi-Earth’:
This is a second Earth. We live on this one and that one at the same time. Everything that stands on its head here is on its feet there. (Science fiction has already made use of similar hypotheses. That alone seems to me a legitimate enough reason to talk about this with children.)
In one of my older stories, I introduced ‘archdogs,’ ‘archbones,’ and ‘trinoculars’ (a product of the prefix tri-, also used in ‘tricow,’ an animal unfortunately unknown to zoology).
I keep in my archives an ‘antiumbrella,’ but have not yet figured out a practical use for it.
The prefix de- lends itself wonderfully to destruction. Starting from this prefix, we can easily arrive at the word ‘deassignment,’ which refers to an assignment, unlike normal homework, that one does not have to do. Far from it, as the point is for the ‘deassignment’ to be destroyed or torn to pieces.
Returning to zoology, to free it from the parentheses in which I left it, let’s take up the ‘vicedog’ and the ‘subcat.’ I offer these animals as gifts to whomever needs them to populate their stories.
In passing, I’ll also offer Italo Calvino, the author of both The Non-Existent Knight and The Cloven Viscount, a ‘semighost’ who is half-human, made of flesh and blood, and half-ghost, clad in sheets and chains, which lends itself wonderfully to stories combining moments of stupendous fear with laughter.
‘Superman’ already exists on comics and is a striking example of the application of the ‘fantastic prefix’ (albeit a pure imitation of Nietzsche, poor guy, and his Ubermensch). But of you want a ‘supergoalie’ (idol of the football field) or a ‘supermatch’ (capable of setting the entire Milky Way on fire), all you have to do is make them up yourself.
More recent prefixes, such as micro-, mini-, and maxi-, which emerged during the 20 th century seem to me to be particularly productive. Here I offer – still free of charge – a ‘microhippo,’ raised at home in an aquarium; a ‘miniskyscraper,’ which fits into a minidrawer’ and is inhabited only by ‘minibillionaires’; and a ‘maxiblanket.’ Capable of covering in winter all the people who would die of cold.
It's probably superfluous to point out, but the ‘fantastic prefix’ is nothing but a particular case of the ‘fantastic binomial,’ with the following components: the prefix, chosen to produce new images; and the usual word, chosen to be enobled through deformation.
If I were to suggest an exercise here, it would be to fill in two parallel columns with randomly chosen prefixes and nouns and then ask to randomly join them. I’ve done it myself. Ninety-nine percent of the marriages arranged according to this rite failed, but one percent resulted in happy and productive couplings.”
I have blogged about prefixes in a post on April 20, 2018 titled Playing with words: PRO or CON? and on December 20, 2024 in another post titled A comic strip about flipping prefixes from ex- to in-.
And there is an article in The New Yorker by Joan Acocella on December 7, 2020 titled The Italian Genius Who Mixed Marxism and Children’s Literature.
What is even worse than having an ‘elephant in the room?’ (a subject that everyone knows about but no one wants to talk about)?
Releasing a crate of snakes is way worse than a single elephant. There is a cartoon by Doug Savage at Savage Chickens on November 24, 2025 titled Taking Off the Pressure. And a well-known article by Geoffrey Brewer at Gallup News on March 19, 2001 is titled Snakes Top List of Americans’ Fears. In their 2001 poll snakes were feared by 51% while speaking in front of an audience was feared by 40%. (Another 1998 poll had 56% fearing snakes and 45% fearing public speaking).
More recently the Chapman Survey of American Fears has the broader fear category of reptiles from 2015 to 2024. A bar chart shown above compares fear of reptiles with fear of public speaking. In 2015, 2016, and 2017 more people feared reptiles. More recently more people feared public speaking.
On November 19, 2025 I blogged about Celebrating a joyful milestone of 3000 blog posts. In that post I mentioned that my overall average was 1,048 page views. But on November 29, 2025, as shown above, I had 17,112 page views, or over 16 times that average! That’s still below my all-time high. On August 25, 2025 I blogged about having 32,316 page views in another post titled This blog had another gigantic spike in page views.
250 years ago Patrick Henry delivered his most famous speech. A version of its text is here. There is an article by Drew Gilpin Faust on pages 22 to 26 of the November 2025 The Atlantic magazine titled No one gave a speech like Patrick Henry. On page 24 he says:
“Henry delivered his legendary ‘Liberty or Death’ speech on March 23, 1775, at the meeting of the Second Virginia Convention in Richmond’s Henrico Parish Church. The colonies were already well on their way to war with England, which would begin just a month later at Lexington and Concord. The First Continental Congress had the previous fall created a Continental Association committed to resisting British incursions on American rights, and Virginians were assembling to prepare for the conflict that was coming to seem inevitable. The decision to meet in Richmond, a modest town 50 miles beyond the reach of the royal governor in the capital of Williamsburg, was itself an indication that the representatives recognized the boldness of their actions.
Yet many members of the Virginia gentry remained nervous about what lay ahead and uncertain whether preparation was simply prudent or would in itself esca- late differences and make reconciliation with Britain impossible. These men of status, reputation, and means were not yet ready to risk their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. It would be Patrick Henry’s job to get them there.
Some 120 Virginians, including such worthies as Jefferson and Washington, gathered on a hill high above the James River, crowding into the pewboxes of the wood-framed church, the largest structure available in a town that had only recently grown to 600 souls. After lengthy discussion ultimately approving the work of the Continental Congress, Henry rose on the fourth day of the convention to ask the clerk to read a set of resolutions proposing that ‘this Colony be immediately put into a posture of defence.’ The time had come for ‘embodying, arming, and disciplining’ a Virginia militia, he maintained. When cautious delegates objected to such a public declaration of military mobilization as unduly provocative, Henry responded with his famous speech.
The text that schoolchildren have declaimed and aspiring orators have studied since the early 19th century was derived from recollections that the distinguished jurist St. George Tucker provided to Wirt, Henry’s biographer, sometime between 1805 and 1815. Tucker was present at the convention to hear Henry speak, and judged that ‘nothing has ever excelled it, and nothing has ever equaled it in its power and effect.’ The version he provided for Wirt and for posterity rests upon the accuracy of his memory of a day more than three decades earlier. Historians have sparred for more than two centuries now over the reliability of this rendering. William Safire, the late journalist, presidential speechwriter, and authority on language and rhetoric, offered the measured assessment of an informed critic: ‘My own judgment is that Patrick Henry made a rousing speech that day that did conclude with the line about liberty or death; that a generation later, to respond to the wishes of his friend writing a biography of the patriot, Judge Tucker recalled what he could and made up the rest. If that is so, Judge Tucker belongs among the ranks of history’s best ghostwriters.’ A unique ghostwriter whose work followed rather than preceded the text.”
There is another article by Harry Kollatz Jr. at Richmond Magazine on March 21, 2025 titled ‘It is what we expect of you’ and subtitled Patrick Henry changed the course of history with a speech – though we’re not sure exactly what he said. Harry said:
“Henry’s rhetoric at Henrico Parish Church wasn’t put to paper by the eyewitness and judge St. George Tucker for more than 40 years. This came in response to frustrated biographer William Wirt, a lawyer and a member of Aaron Burr’s defense team in the former vice president’s Richmond treason trial, a United States attorney general, speechwriter and would-be 19th-century attorney turned novelist.
Wirt began collecting material for a biography of Henry in 1808. He despaired of finding an accurate record of Henry’s ‘greatest hits’ from the earlier part of his career. Tucker wrote for Wirt his best recollection, although that correspondence went missing around 1904. Thomas Jefferson, who was in the room where the speech happened, also contributed his memory to the 1817 book. This material would form the most familiar version of Henry’s declamation.
But did Wirt conflate the sentiments with the decades-old recollections of Judge Tucker?
At his Monticello library, Jefferson placed Wirt’s book on the fiction shelves. Perhaps this is also a reflection of his long-simmering dislike of Henry. Yet Jefferson somewhat grudgingly admitted, ‘It is not now easy to say what we should have done without Patrick Henry.’ ”
And on page 23 of his article Mr. Faust also said that:
“Henry reminds us of how our inability to hear the past before the advent of audio recording has left us with an incomplete and even distorted understanding of history. He lived in an era when the spoken word had not yet been overtaken by the power and reach of print. This was a time - and Henry was a figure - we can only poorly understand if we do not recognize the centrality of oratory.
An assiduous scholar has located nearly 100 responses by individuals who heard Henry’s speeches, so we at least have secondhand access to the impact of his words. We can’t retrieve his voice, but we can find accounts of how it made audiences feel. As one contemporary explained, there was ‘an irresistible force to his words which no description could make intelligible to one who had never seen him, nor heard him speak.’ On a trip through Virginia as a young man, the future president Andrew Jackson sought out the orator he had heard so much about. ‘No description I had ever heard,’ he reflected, ‘no conception I had ever formed, had given me any just idea of the man’s powers of eloquence.’ Patrick Henry had become a tourist attraction.
We can’t even read Henry’s most important speeches. The potency of his rhetoric derived in no small part from its extemporaneity. He left no texts or notes of his Revolutionary-era addresses, and observers described being so swept up in the moment that they were unable to document his performances. ‘No reporter whatever could take down what he actually said,’ the Virginia judge Spencer Roane remembered. ‘Much of the effect of his eloquence arose from his voice, gesture, etc., which in print is entirely lost.’ Today, Henry’s legacy is left chiefly to schoolchildren tasked with memorizing and reciting a reconstruction of his ‘Liberty or Death’ speech of 1775, pieced together by his biographer William Wirt from witnesses’ testimony two decades after his death.”
A Currier and Ives lithograph came from Wikimedia Commons.
