When I recently looked at Apple News on my iPhone I found an article by Pallavi Mehra at Apartment Therapy from June 4, 2026 with the clickbait title of My Dad Told Me to Use a Banana to Clean My Shoes, and I Can’t Believe It Worked.
What about side effects? That title should be followed by asking: How do I get these chimps to stop following me around?
There are two articles in Toastmaster magazine that discuss an uncommon childhood anxiety disorder called selective mutism. One by Avery Matteo in the latest June 2026 issue on page 8 is titled How I Found My Voice. She said:
“Some of my earliest memories are shaped by my experiences with selective mutism, an anxiety disorder that makes speaking to unfamiliar people feel impossible. Public spaces were overwhelming, and even small interactions—such as asking a question to my teacher at school or expressing a need—felt out of reach.”
Another article by Jolene Stockman in the July 2019 issue on page 11 is titled Fitting In As An Autistic Speaker. Her third sentence said:
“We didn’t know it yet, but we were the founding members of Ngāmotu Breakfast Toastmasters, a club that would remain active 20 years later and took me from school kid with selective mutism to Distinguished Toastmaster and TEDx speaker.”
Wikipedia has an article on selective mutism, and there is a Selective Mutism Association with an article titled What is SM? There is a blog post by Anthony D. Smith at Psychology Today on March 7, 2026 titled What You Should Know About Selective Mutism. And the National Health Service [NHS] UK has a February 17, 2023 article on Selective Mutism beginning with the following description:
“Selective mutism is an anxiety disorder where a person is unable to speak in certain social situations, such as with classmates at school or to relatives they do not see very often.
It usually starts during childhood and, if left untreated, can persist into adulthood. A child or adult with selective mutism does not refuse or choose not to speak at certain times, they're literally unable to speak.
The expectation to talk to certain people triggers a freeze response with feelings of anxiety and panic, and talking is impossible. In time, the person may learn to anticipate the situations that provoke this distressing reaction and do all they can to avoid them.
However, people with selective mutism are able to speak freely to certain people, such as close family and friends, when nobody else is around to trigger the freeze response. Selective mutism affects about 1 in 140 young children [~0.7 %]. It's more common in girls and children who have recently migrated from their country of birth.”
Finally, there is a long article by Chaya Rodrigues-Pereira et al. in European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry on December 1, 2021 (Volume 32, number 10, pages 1821 to 1839) titled Diagnosing selective mutism: a critical review of measures for clinical practice and research.
The ‘speak no evil’ monkey image was adapted from Wikimedia Commons.
There is a detailed 2026 book by Roger Kreuz titled Strikingly Similar: Plagiarism and Appropriation from Chaucer to Chatbots. An article by Anthony Lane in The New Yorker on March 22, 2026 that reviews it is titled How Bad Is Plagiarism, Really?
Chapter 2 of the book is titled The Plagiarism Hunters and it begins with a section on page 29 titled Copyright Traps. I blogged about traps on November 30, 2025 in a post titled What the heck is a mountweazel?
On June 9, 2025 I blogged about Plagiarism and speechwriting. A section in Chapter 6 of the book starting on page 159 titled Dear Graduates discusses commencement speeches. One example on Page 160 starting at the second paragraph says:
“In 2005, for example, the principal of Springstead High School in Florida gave an inspiring address to her graduating class. However, her remarks consisted of a word-for-word recitation of the well-known ‘wear sunscreen’ essay written by Mary Schmich. Her advice was originally published in the Chicago Tribune in 1997 and has become widely available online. However, the principal chose to preface her remarks by stating that what followed were her personal thoughts. And at other points during her speech she used the phrase ‘my advice’ to reinforce the perception that the ideas were her own.
To make things worse, the principal wasn’t a first-time offender. In a commencement speech delivered the previous year, she appropriated from a collection of inspirational thoughts titled ‘All I need to Know I Learned from Noah’s Ark.’ Although the provenance of these sayings is murky, she left her audience under the impression that the ideas were her own.
In an apology for both episodes, the principal admitted to ‘unintentional errors.’ The school district put a letter of reprimand in her personnel file and gave her a one-day suspension, although it was with pay. A state inquiry in 2007 resulted in a $1,500 fine, although she was allowed to retain her state certifications as an educator.”
My image was modified from this Airwheel suitcase at Wikimedia Commons.
Smith College held its 147th commencement on May 18, 2025. An article by Darin Zullo at Boston.com on May 20, 2025 about it is titled Smith College commencement speaker returns honorary degree after plagiarizing her speech. It linked to a letter by Sarah Willie-LeBreton at Presidential Letters: Follow-Up to Commencement 2025 on May 20, 2025 which stated that:
“I must share with you, however, that it has come to our attention that one of our honorary degree recipients—musician Evelyn M. Harris—borrowed much of her speech to graduates and their families from the commencement speeches of others without the attribution typical of and central to the ideals of academic integrity.
In conversations about this after the event, Ms. Harris was forthcoming about her choices while also acknowledging that she sought to infuse the words of others with her own emotional valence. With appreciation for the requirement of academic integrity so central to the values of Smith, Ms. Harris has chosen to relinquish her honorary degree.”
This event also was discussed by Jonathan Bailey at Plagiarism Today on May 21, 2025 in another article titled Graduation Speaker Plagiarizes Speech, Returns Honorary Degree. He has a section about other incidents titled The Long, Sad History of Commencement Plagiarism.
My cartoon used a scroll adapted from OpenClipArt.
There is an interesting article by Justin Pot at Popular Science on May 24, 2026 titled 3 buttons that don’t actually do anything. Pushbuttons that don’t do anything immediately would have been a better title. His examples are pedestrian crosswalk buttons, elevator door close buttons, and office wall thermostat buttons.
A pedestrian crosswalk button at an intersection, like the one shown above, might activate the cycle for a walk light. But during peak traffic hours it might not do anything, because the crosswalk light cycle is being automatically included.
Elevator door close buttons don’t act immediately - because the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) calls for a time delay.
And changing the temperature setting on an office wall thermostat may not have any effect at all. There is a Wikipedia article titled placebo buttons about that topic.
But I have never seen a nonfunctional button marked like the one shown above.
The thermostat and elevator buttons were modified from images at Wikimedia Commons.
There is a detailed article by Eleonora J. Beier, Suphasiree Chantavarin, and Fernanda Ferreira at Psychology and Aging on March 27, 2026 (pages 203 to 218) titled Do Disfluencies Increase With Age? Evidence From a Sequential Corpus Study of Disfluencies. In their fifth paragraph they explain what they focused on:
“Disfluencies have been identified at different levels of production, such as prosodic (e.g., improper stress), lexical (e.g., repetitions), and syntactic (e.g., phrase revisions). Other types of disfluencies include filled pauses (e.g., um, uh), lexical fillers (e.g., well, you know), and silent pauses. In addition, fluency can be assessed by measuring a person’s speech rate, or the speed with which they talk. In this study, we focus on filled pauses (um, uh), repeats (e.g., went to the the store), and repairs (e.g., I think- I believe that …), as well as speech rate.”
The abstract says:
“Speech disfluencies such as repeated words and pauses provide information about the cognitive systems underlying speech production. Understanding whether older age leads to changes in speech fluency can therefore help characterize the robustness of these systems over the life span. Older adults have been assumed to be more disfluent, but current evidence is minimal and contradictory. Particularly noteworthy is the lack of longitudinal data that would help establish whether a given individual’s disfluency rates change over time. This study examines changes in disfluency rates through a sequential design with a longitudinal component, involving the analysis of 325 recorded interviews conducted with 91 individuals at several points in their lives, spanning the ages of 20–94 years. We analyzed the speech of these individuals to assess the extent to which they became more disfluent in later interviews. We found that, with older age, individuals spoke more slowly and repeated more words. However, older age was not associated with other types of disfluencies such as filled pauses (uh’s and um’s) and repairs.
Overall, this study provides evidence that, although age itself is not a strong predictor of disfluencies, age leads to changes in other speech characteristics among some individuals (i.e., speech rate and indicators of lexical and syntactic complexity), and those changes in turn predict the production of disfluencies over the life span. These findings help resolve previous inconsistencies in this literature and set the stage for future experimental work on the cognitive mechanisms underlying changes in speech production in healthy aging.”
And their conclusions are:
“We have presented results from a corpus study of conversational speech to quantify age-related changes in speech fluency sequentially rather than cross-sectionally. We found that older adults spoke more slowly, consistent with previous reports (Castro & James 2014; Gordon et al., 2019; Horton et al., 2010)
and we observed that they produced more repeated words. At the same time, older adults did not produce more repairs or filled pauses, nor was there an effect of age on all three types of disfluencies combined.
Our results show that whether a relationship between age and disfluency is observed depends on the type of disfluency measured, which in turn helps explain previous inconsistent findings. Overall, we suggest that while age is not a strong predictor of fluency measures other than speech rate, there are large individual differences in how other speech characteristics change with age, even in relatively high-functioning older adults, reflecting the trade-off between slower processing speed (Salthouse, 1996; Salthouse & Meinz, 1995) and accumulated vocabulary and language experience (Ramscar et al., 2014). Thus, some individuals slow down their speech as they age—a change associated with higher lexical diversity and the use of less frequent words but also more filled pauses—whereas others do not.
Our findings challenge the prevalent assumption that older age leads to more disfluent speech by showing that other changes in speech production (i.e., overall speech rate, word frequency, lexical diversity, and sentence length) are better predictors of disfluencies than age.”
The cartoon was modified from the center of an image at Wikimedia Commons.
Sometimes a comic strip can show you something very creative. On November 29, 2025 Grant Snider at Incidental Comics had one titled The Best Part with the following dialogue:
“The best part
of reading two books at once:
don’t need a bookmark.”
I illustrated it with an image. On October 11, 2024 I had blogged about A book on creativity from Grant Snider – profusely illustrated by comics.
This is almost the same geometry as used on couplings for railroad cars, as shown above.
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