Glassophobia yet again

What is worse than a pseudo-technical term for fear of public speaking like glossophobia - which will send you down blind alleys when you try to search for useful information? You also could misspell it as glassophobia. That error pops up every now and then in books, web articles, and even a YouTube video.

On April 8, 2017 at Amazon there was a 100-page paperback book by Perez Dalton titled How to Be Good At Everything. Well, not really everything. On December 22, 2017 at Amazon there was another short (47-page) paperback book by Perez Dalton with an absurdly long title of How to Overcome Fear of Public Speaking (Glassophobia): Powerful Techniques for Creating Strong Social Presence, Staying Above Social Anxiety and Building Confidence.

On October 17, 2018 the Purple (mattress) web site had an article titled Sleep Guide for Anxiety which claimed:  

“The fear of public speaking (glassophobia) is still ranked alongside death as the number one fear of 20 percent of Americans.”

They linked to a blog post from the 2017 Chapman Survey of American Fears – but it actually ranked dying at #48 and public speaking at #52.  

On November 18, 2018 at Every Day Facts there was a four-minute YouTube video mistitled Glassophobia explained briefly.

And on April 6, 2019 down in South Africa at her Communicate! blog Rosanne Hurly Coyne posted on Glassophobia, and reposted on July 11, 2019 at KZN Women in Business as Glassophobia or Fear of Public Speaking.

The image of a glass being filled was modified from one by the EPA at Wikimedia Commons.

Is notus a xenophobic compound word?

Notus (population ~540) is a very small city in southwestern Idaho, whose post office is shown above. Is its name an unusual xenophobic compound word formed from not (an adverb) and us (a pronoun)? That explanation was given in an article by Danielle Wiley titled The hazy history of Notus which appeared in the Idaho Press on March 25, 2016. It is implausible, since the name is pronounced like it instead was spelled notice.

Her article mentioned that notus also was thought to be a Native American word meaning “it’s all right.” Finally, near very end she mentioned:

“The town's website describes it as the ‘city of the southwind’ because the word notus is believed to be a Greek word for ‘south wind.’ ”

I got curious and looked up notus in the Oxford English Dictionary. It says that noun means the south wind, frequently personified ;  Notus the god of the south wind, son of Eos and Astraeus. The Latin word comes down to us from ancient Greek (Νότος). Apparently someone in southwest Idaho knew a bit of Greek mythology.

At Wikimedia Commons I even found an image of the god Notus from a 1794 book.

Here is a Youtube video about someone who grew up in Notus.

An abysmal article about fear of public speaking based on shallow research

According to his LinkedIn profile, Michael Hanson is Director of IT Technology for UnitedHealth Group in New Port Richey, Florida (in the Tampa metro area). He writes a blog titled The Middle Manager. Beginning on April 2, 2019 he posted a series of 13 articles on Public Speaking. The first blog post, just titled Public Speaking, is truly abysmal, but the rest are OK. The first three paragraphs in that first post say:

“I want to start a series on a subject that affects a lot of people. The technical term is Glossophobia – fear of public speaking. This fear is considered a social phobia, and a paper published with the US National Institutes of Health noted that of people that had social phobias, the most common was speaking in public, by a significant – 89.4% – margin (Source: Epidemiology of social phobia: a clinical approach). 

An inability to speak in public can actually negatively impact your career. It can reduce your compensation by as much as 10%, and there’s a 15% chance that it would affect a opportunities for career advancement to higher leadership positions (Source: Columbia University: Social Anxiety Disorder). 

I’ve heard that fear of public speaking ranks up with life-changing events such as divorce or death of a loved one. It’s frequently quoted, but I couldn’t find any actual support sources. But given the above numbers, it’s probably fairly accurate.”

First, a phobia is different from just a fear, as is illustrated in the Venn diagram shown above, which appeared in my December 11, 2013 blog post titled Spouting Nonsense: July 2013 Toastmaster magazine article fumbles fears and phobias. You can find the detailed differences discussed on this web page at PubMed. And I’d call glossophobia a pseudo-technical term.

Second, the PubMed abstract from a magazine article that Michael linked to was published in European Psychiatry. It described results from a survey done in Sesto Fiorentino, which is a suburb of Florence, Italy. What percent of people there had a phobia of public speaking? The abstract says 6.88% had social phobia. Multiply that by 0.894, and you find just 5.88% of the population in that suburb there had a phobia of public speaking. That’s a rather small percentage. Does it have any relevance to a U.S. audience? Not really!

According to a 2008 article by Ruscio et al 12.1% of a U.S. sample had social phobia sometime in their lives. Of those, 88.7% had a phobia of public speaking/performance, which multiplies to 10.7% with public speaking phobia. That’s about half of the 21.2% with a fear of public speaking/performance (stage fright). It’s purely coincidence that the percentages with speaking phobia, 89.4 and 88.7 were nearly equal.     

Third, the Columbia University article Michael linked to was about social phobia, not fear of public speaking. Both it and the European Psychiatry abstract were used before by Peter Khoury in a horrible article at Magnetic Speaking, which I blogged about on December 15, 2016 in a post titled Believable and unbelievable statistics about fears and phobias of public speaking.

  

Fourth, the blog post about results from the 2018 Chapman Survey of American Fears had percentages for People I love dying 56.4% (rank #6), Dying 27.9% (#54), and Public speaking 26.2% (#59). The percentage for people I love dying is over twice that for public speaking, so it is not close at all.

Fifth, how about divorce? On December 14, 2016 I blogged about how Public speaking was the 7th most commonly stressful activity in an online survey done for Hired.com. Percentages were: Death of a loved one 94%, Going through a divorce or break up 92%, Looking for a job 83%, Moving 82%, Planning a wedding 78%, Getting a root canal 73%, public speaking 70%.

Poetry and songwriting are the opposite of verbosity

On May 11, 2019 I had blogged about Does verbosity come from having lots of time to kill? The opposite of verbosity is making every single word count - so you can tell a story in about five minutes. Poets and songwriters can do this brilliantly. Recently I have been listening to the Bruce Springsteen studio album Western Stars. A YouTube video of the upbeat song Tucson Train is shown above. Bruce’s lyrics tell most of the story just in the first and third verses:

“I got so down and out in Frisco

Tired of the pills and the rain

I picked up, headed for the sunshine

I left a good thing behind

Seemed all of our love was in vain

Now my baby’s coming in on the Tucson train….

We fought hard over nothing

We fought till nothing remained

I’ve carried that nothing for a long time

Now I carry my operator’s license

And spend my days just running this crane

And my baby’s coming in on the Tucson train”

Another sadder song, Chasin’ Wild Horses has mournful pedal steel guitar along with the strings and  horns. You can listen to it here on YouTube. Lyrics in the second through fourth verses tell most of that cowboy story:

“Left my home, left my friends

I didn’t say goodbye

I contract out to the BLM

Up on the Montana line

Chasin’ wild horses, chasin’ wild horses

We’re out before sunup, in after sundown

There’s two men in the chopper

Two under saddle on the ground

In the evenings we’d hop in the pickup

Head into town for a drink

Make sure I work till I’m so damn tired

Way too tired to think

You lose track of time

It’s all just storms blowing through

You come rollin’ ‘cross my mind

Your hair flashin’ in the blue

Like wild horses, just like wild horses

Just like wild horses”

What could you edit out of the story you are telling?

Clip-on ties are for when safety is more important than fashion

In Shark Tank at Computerworld on August 23, 2019 there was an article titled Life-saving sartorial advice that discussed an employee beginning a career with a gigantic company who manufactured computer equipment. He was maintaining that equipment, and was advised by an old-timer mentoring him to get some snap -on (clip-on) ties to wear with his uniform of a white shirt and suit. What happened next?

“It only takes a few weeks for fish to learn the wisdom of the old-timer’s advice. He goes on a call to sort out a malfunctioning card sorter, which he does, and then he leans over it to watch it do its thing. That’s when his tie gets too close to the moving parts. It’s instantly ripped from his neck, and then wraps around the rollers and brings the sorter to a screeching halt.”

My first job back in 1977 was in the Ann Arbor research lab of the Climax Molybdenum Company. Engineers were expected to wear ties, and for safety’s sake to tuck them inside our lab coats when working with shop equipment like bandsaws or hacksaws. As shown above, I acquired an assortment of clip-on ties. Police and security guards also wear clip-on ties so they don’t get strangled by any of the angry people they deal with. Public speakers usually don’t have to worry about people being that angry.  

Clip-ons are not the only alternative to regular ties. As shown above in an engraving with five Celebrated English Chemists wearing bowties, chemists traditionally wore them to prevent dipping the end of a tie in the liquids the handled. (My father was a chemical engineer and he also wore bowties).

The Safety First sign came from Wikimedia Commons, and the engraving of Celebrated English Chemists came from the Library of Congress.

Celebrating 1,500,000 page views

This blog just passed a milestone of getting a total of over 1,500,000 page views. That number is over twice the population for the Boise metropolitan statistical area (730,426), which is the 80th largest in the U.S.

Where were my viewers? All over the world! The bar chart shown above lists the top ten countries, which have 76% of the total. Just 42% were from the U.S., 12% from France, and 8% from Russia, etc.   

I have published 1768 posts, so an average one would have 848 views. The most popular post had 22 times the average. The five most popular posts [number of views], title, and date are:

[19010] Two types of speech outlines: speaking and preparation 2009 07 05 

[18049] The 14 Worst Human Fears in the 1977 Book of Lists: where did this data really come from? 2009 10 27

[7565] How can you easily draw dotted chalk lines on a blackboard? 2011 12 29

[6121] Does homeopathic Argentum nitricum reduce anxiety? 2009 12 11

[3632] Herbal remedies for anxiety 2009 09 18

Web links for finding 666 Table Topics questions for Toastmasters club meetings

Table Topics is the impromptu speaking section of a Toastmasters club meeting where members get to give a one to two minute answer to a question. That section uses questions asked by the Table Topics Master. Where does he or she get those questions?

In my July 7, 2019 blog post titled Club officers in Toastmasters (VPPR and VPM) should use all the brains they can borrow I had mentioned Lark Doley’s Golden Knowledge Base. Her web  page on Club Meetings lists a .docx file for D46_101 Ideas for Great Table Topics_Mark LaVergne and a .pdf file for D08_365 Sample Table Topics_John. Elsewhere there also is a .pdf with the 101 Ideas.

In my February 24, 2018 blog post titled Were you recently visited by the Table Topics Bunny? I mentioned that a search for Table Topics questions should also use the phrase “icebreaker questions”. At Conversation Starters World you can find a web page with 200 Icebeaker questions (and also a .pdf version).

The image of a Triumphant cartoon woman was modified from one at Wikimedia Commons.