Piano flooring? Lose the jargon!

Last June I ranted about how technical jargon had escaped from industry and was being used to confuse the public.

A few days ago I got a tabloid sized advertising flyer in the mail. An ad on the cover for The Piano Gallery began with a headline of: FORCED PIANO LIQUIDATION.

Then there were two sentences with obscure industry jargon. “Textron Financial is terminating all piano flooring. To avoid penalties and high interest rates, Utah’s Largest Piano Dealer is forced to sell all grand, upright, digital and player pianos floored with Textron.

What the heck does “piano flooring” mean? All I could think of was the scene shown in this video clip from The Fabulous Baker Boys, where Michelle Pfeiffer uses the top of a grand piano as flooring while seductively crooning the song “Makin’ Whoopee.”

“Piano flooring” actually is music jargon for one type of floor plan inventory financing. Under these agreements the finance company agrees to pay a piano manufacturer the wholesale price of a piano on behalf of the dealer, who in turn sells the piano in the retail market. The dealer agrees to pay back the finance company after having sold the piano. Similar inventory finance agreements are used for other products like boats, motorcycles, and recreational vehicles.

They should have said that: “Our problem is your opportunity to save lots of money. We need to sell these pianos immediately, since we lost our financing for keeping them on display in our showroom.”

Alfred Hitchcock used the term MacGuffin to describe a plot device, perhaps an object like secret documents, which is of much more interest to the characters in a movie than to the audience. If it does not benefit your audience, then don’t waste their time by describing the MacGuffin.

What is the worst acronym ever devised?

Acronyms are jargon that can confuse your audience, particularly if you do not define them the first time you use them. Acronyms should be avoided whenever possible. In a previous post on Drowning in Acronyms I lamented their wide use. Back when I was a small child acronyms still were uncommon enough that one of my mother’s friends could threaten her kids by saying that: “If you don’t behave, then I’m going to send you home COD (Cash On Delivery) on the L&N (Louisville and Nashville railroad).

Acronyms are a wonderful way of mystifying outsiders because there are no consistent rules for making them up. Sometimes articles or prepositions are included, like TMS which originally was The Metallurgical Society, and every month publishes JOM, which once was more logically called the Journal of Metals.

Some acronyms are contrived. For example, TWAIN means Technology Without An Interesting Name. CAPTCHA means a Completely Automated Public Turing (test to tell) Computers (and) Humans Apart and was even trademarked by my alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University. An organization can chose its name without ever thinking about how its acronym can be pronounced.

My nomination for the worst acronym ever is for what used to be called the American Symphony Orchestra League. Once they even titled their newsletter ASOL (possibly an obscene synonym for anus). Imagine calling them up and having the phone cheerily answered, “Good morning, ASOL.” It would have been much better if they had named themselves the American League of Symphony Orchestras (ALSO). In 2007 they finally did change the name to the League of American Orchestras (LAO). They now claim that corresponds to a Chinese word for “old”, as in “wise elder.”

Do you have another nominee for the worst acronym ever (WAE)?

Joy of software: What you see may NOT be what you get

We are all used to software claims that “What you see is what you get.” The long acronym for this feature is WYSIWYG (pronounced wizzi-wig). Of course, often it is not. The definition in Wikipedia waffles by saying that: “content displayed during editing appears VERY SIMILAR to the final output” rather than identical.

Even little things like carriage returns and line feeds can get messed up when you cut and paste from one application to another. Spaces can disappear or extra blank lines can appear. Symbols can be replaced by apparently unrelated ones. Fonts can be replaced by other fonts. When you go from one computer to another, watch out!

For example, if you go look at the March 25, 2009 post by Sims Wyeth on one of the FastCompany blogs about Coaching and Training for Public Speaking and Effective Sales Presentations you will see the following (my italics added to highlight missing spaces):

The FiveDon’ts of Sales Presenting

When transforming your house into a dream home,talk to three architects.

When getting heart surgery to transform thequality of your life, talk to three surgeons.

And to transform your sales presentations intoreally good sales presentations, talk to three consultants.

Those four missing spaces are the digital equivalent to a stutter. They started in March but seem to have gone away in his April 1 post.

Last week Mitch Ross discussed how PowerPoint fonts do not transfer properly from a Mac to a PC. Last year I found out that fonts may not even transfer in PowerPoint 2003 from my desktop PC to my laptop PC. Apparently some uncommonly used fonts like Matisse just never got loaded on my laptop. Microsoft Office was loaded on those machines about a year apart, so I may simply have chosen different options because the laptop had a much smaller hard drive. The moral is to always check your presentation before show time.

I first ran headlong into the font portability problem on word processors back in late 1993. Two colleagues and I were writing a tutorial article for the Society of Automotive Engineers on “Spot Weld Failure Analysis for Accident Reconstruction” (SAE Paper No. 940570).

As senior author I drafted most of it on my PC. Then one of my co-authors drafted the next sections on his Mac. His boss, the third author, read the printed versions of both. Then he added his text, comments, and changes. The boss’s administrative assistant next tried to put everything together into one coherent manuscript on her PC. She was going to have to send it to Detroit as camera-ready copy.

There were 12 equations and a list of 15 symbols with many subscripts. Almost nothing had moved intact from one machine to another. Even the symbol for the constant pi π got changed to another character. We spent several hours going through the manuscript before it finally was ready to print out and mail in.

When should you stop rehearsing for a while?

The previous post about contests had me thinking more about rehearsing, which is always recommended as a way of overcoming stage fright. (Advice on how to rehearse appears in this previous post).

Before a contest it is tempting to rehearse repeatedly. When should you stop? At the Boise State University library I found a book by Stewart Gordon called Mastering the Art of Performance: a primer for musicians. Musicians have problems similar to contest speakers, so the book has a whole chapter on overcoming stage fright. On page 107 Mr. Gordon says that it is is time to “give it a rest” and pursue a diversion when you have any of the following symptoms:

“Your concentration becomes fuzzy and forced.

You are prone to making mistakes that you don’t usually make.
.
You become irritable or temperamental.

You feel physical pain as a result of tension (headaches, neck or back pain).

You are consistently getting results that you know are below par for your present level of ability.”

You can read most of this book chapter on stage fright by putting the keyword “diversion” in the "search in this book" box on the top right corner of the page at Google Books, and then choosing page 107.

Toastmasters speech contests: world championship of public speaking

Every year Toastmasters runs a series of International Speech Contests which eventually result in someone winning the World Championship of Public Speaking. Getting there is a long process, as discussed in this video by the 2001 champion, Darren LaCroix. It includes his first comedy club appearance back in 1992.

On Saturday morning I walked a mile down the road to see a Toastmasters International Speech Contest. It was held at the Prairie Dog Playhouse, which is a community theater that produces Musical Melodrama Parodies, like Space Trek. The contest I saw was at the Area level. An Area is a grouping of about five clubs. Two Areas had their contests that morning. I have listed rough estimates for the number of members in each level of the organization, which are as follows:

Club ~25 members

Area A1 (5 Clubs) ~125

Division A (20 Clubs) ~500

District 15 (91 Clubs) ~2300

Region 1 (8 Districts) ~18,400

All Toastmasters (12 regions) ~230,000 members

Our former club president (and current treasurer), Deborah Whitman, won Area A1. An Area contest winner already is in quite a select group, roughly the top 1% of speakers.

There also were area contests for two-minute impromptu speeches, which Toastmasters calls Table Topics.

Last May I attended the District 15 Spring Conference here in Boise. One of the highlights was the District International Speech Contest. It was won by Rich Hopkins, whose speech Glorious Victory is on YouTube. Rich went on to win Region 1 and was a finalist in the World Championship. The district winner is one out of about 2000 members, or roughly the top 0.05%!

On YouTube you also view Amy Samet’s 2007 Region 3 speech, Nothing is Impossible, and Dan Weedlin’s Region 1 speech, Hold on to the Rope.

National Speakers Association and Speaker magazine

If you would like to find out about how professional speakers do what they do, head over to the web site for the National Speakers Association (NSA). Near the bottom of the left side of that page you will see an image of the cover for the current issue of their Speaker magazine. Click on the image for that issue (March 2009) to see a larger view along with the very detailed navigation menu.

There are many options for navigation. One of the neater ones is that you can point to a featured article on the cover, like “Price Wars: Overcoming Fee Objections,” then click, and you will go directly to that article.

You can navigate forward or backward in a magazine issue to the start or the end |<>| of an issue, or either back or forwards by pairs of pages with the <> keys. You can change the Settings to see a single page view as well. If you click on Archives you can see covers for all the back issues online (to January 2007), and then download them for later viewing offline. You also can use Search to find specific topics.

NSA Professional of Affiliate membership is $425 per year, plus an initiation fee of $175 for a total initial “investment” of $600. Right now I think I’ll pass on that.

Fee objections are nothing new. Back in January 2005 there was an article by Lawrence L. Steinmetz in Springs magazine titled Price Equals Perception. It discusses how to overcome specific objections and turn a price buyer into a value buyer. Dr. Steinmetz gives more detailed advice in his book on How to Sell at Margins Higher Than Your Competitors: Winning Every Sale at Full Price, Rate, or Fee.

Two recent viewpoints on overcoming fear and shyness

Last week two well-known speaking coaches discussed overcoming fear and shyness. Nick Morgan posted about The 5 best ways to conquer your fear of public speaking, which were:

1. Rehearse and practice
2. Engage in positive self-talk
3. Breathe deeply and slowly
4. Work on your unconscious
5. If all else fails, do what the musicians do: take beta blockers

I have discussed Nick’s advice on rehearsal twice previously here and here.

Sims Wyeth posted about Presentation skills for the shy. He discussed whether shyness was more by nature or nurture, and how it could be overcome. Somehow this post acquired a digital stutter. There are about sixty places where spaces between words are missing. Although it is still readable the missing spaces make novel compound words which resemble German more than English.

You can find more of Sims Wyeth’s posts under the Effective-Communication tag at Fast Company.