Calling the largest bedroom in a home the master bedroom now is offensive language

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Preferred phrases can change over time. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a master bedroom as:

 

“a large or principal bedroom”

 

But an article by Sydney Franklin at The New York Times on August 5, 2020 is titled The Biggest Bedroom Is No Longer a ‘Master.’ Another article by Teneal Zuvela at Home beautiful on September 1, 2024 described The problematic history of the term ‘master bedroom.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Merriam-Webster said master was first used a century ago. How common it was is shown above via the Google Books Ngram Viewer.

 

Stephan Pastis’s Pearls Before Swine cartoon for May 27, 2025 has the following dialogue about adjectives:

 

Goat: Hey, do you want to see my new master bedroom?

 

Rat: ‘Primary’ bedroom. The word ‘master’ is offensive.

 

Goat: Primary bedroom.

 

Three students: ‘Main bedroom.’ The term ‘primary’ is offensive to primary school students.

 

Goat: I’m gonna just stop talking.

 

Rat: That probably offended someone.

 

The Simpsons fictional character Principal Seymour Skinner could object to principal bedroom.  

 

 

Simon Sinek describes recovering after losing his train of thought

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an excellent two-minute video from Simon Sinek at TikTok on March 17, 2025 titled What’s your worst public speaking horror story? It also is at Facebook and Instagram. He says about that potential worst moment that:

 

“In the speaking world, there is a big conference thrown by an organization called the Meeting Planners Association of America. Basically all the people from all the big companies and events planners that basically book all the speakers. And if you get invited to this conference, it’s a big deal because if you nail it you’re set for life - because all the people who will hire you for the rest of your career are in the room. And if you fail, I mean your career is basically over. It’s going to be rinky-dink little events for the rest of your life.

 

Anyway, as I was getting going in my career back in the Start with WHY days, I got invited to the Meeting Planners Association of America. I got to speak at it – great honor! I’ve given the speech 1,000 times; I know it inside and out. I’m out there, I’m on the stage speaking. I forgot my train of thought. It’s happened, I’m a pro. I know what to do: go quiet. Find your place, keep going. So I go quiet, not finding my place. Now the panic sets in. I look at my pad, I look at the audience. I don’t know anything that’s going on. I can’t ask the audience, ‘Can you tell me what I was thinking?’ That would be a disaster. My hands are sweaty. My heart is pounding. I don’t know what to do. My life is flashing before my eyes at the end of my career.

 

So I turn to the audience and I say, ‘Do you ever have that experience where you lose your train of thought and just sheer panic sets in? Your hands get clammy, your heart starts pounding?’ I say, ‘Well, I’m having that right now and let me tell you, I’m so glad it’s happening cause it makes me feel alive.’ And the audience erupted. And then I turned to the audience and say, ‘Can somebody please tell me what I was saying, cause I’ve completely forgotten?’ Somebody shouted out, I picked up and off I went. I got more applause for admitting what I was going through than for the actual speech. So it ended up working out okay.

 

I want to hear your horror stories as well. I wanna hear the time you were giving a speech at a wedding, a presentation for work, maybe you were standing on a stage as well. Tell me some of the horror stories you’ve experienced and maybe even how you turned them around, or how they didn’t get turned around. And the one thing we think is the most harrowing – I’ll send you a book just to say, ‘Sorry you had to go through that.’ So just put them down in the comments; can’t wait to hear from you.”

    

The cartoon was adapted from a surprised face at OpenClipArt.

 

 

What four things would you rather do than call customer support?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an article by Shep Hyken on April 1, 2025 titled Your Call Is Very Important to Us. In it he discusses some results from surveys titled The State of Customer Service and CX 2025. There were two online surveys of 2,119 U. S. adults done between January 8 and 13 of 2025.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As shown above via a bar chart, 53% would rather have dinner with in-laws. 39% would rather clean a toilet, 34% would rather visit the dentist, and 26% would rather speak in front of an audience of 1,000! There is a brief Instagram video too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some of these situations also were covered in his previous Achieving Customer Amazement (ACA) surveys. As shown above, percentages who would rather clean a toilet were quite similar: 43% in 2024, 38% in 2023, and 42% in 2022. Percentages who would rather visit the dentist were 46% in 2022 and 48% in 2021.    

 

An image of brushing a toilet came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

Do’s and don’ts for taking photographs with your smartphone or camera

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a very useful article by Bambi Cash and Blake Carver on pages 12 to 15 of the June 2025 issue of the Toastmaster magazine titled How to Take Great Photos: The do’s and don’ts of taking great photographs. It has sections with advice on:

 

Club or Large Group Shots

Smaller Groups

Hand Gestures [not in the pdf version of this issue]

Speakers and Presenters

Background

Lighting

Selfies

 

There also are Photo Tips from Professionals, and under Background they advise:

 

DON’T: Have people stand in front of a cluttered or confusing background.

DO: Pose them in front of a solid background so the focus is on their faces.

 

But they missed a simple tip - making sure to briefly check ypur recorded image for unintended background effects. What you see may NOT be exactly what you will get. It’s often called the tree growing out of the head problem. (Indoors you instead might get a flagpole). 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Your viewfinder image may have the lens aperture wide open, which results in a small depth of field, as is shown above. Then the recorded image has the aperture stopped down, which results in a larger depth of field (also shown). An iPhone support article titled Use Portrait mode on your iPhone says that:

 

“With Portrait mode, the camera creates a depth-of-field effect. This lets you capture photos with a sharp focus on the subject and a blurred background.”

 

There also is an interesting web only article by Biju Arayakkeel in the October 2020 Toastmaster magazine titled 10 Storytelling Lessons from Photography.

 

The smartphone cartoon came from OpenClipArt.

 

 

Similes in speechwriting

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a simile as:

 

“a figure of speech comparing two unlike things that is often introduced by like or as (as in cheeks like roses)”

 

Of course, there also is a Wikipedia page. And there is a brief, humorous article by John Cadley in the August 2019 issue of Toastmaster Magazine on page 30 titled Silly Similes - those wonderful idioms that don’t say what they mean.

 

A song by John Prine titled It’s A Big Old Goofy World is stitched together from similes. You can listen to it here at YouTube. And Mickey Cheatham posted about it in his STEAMD blog on January 1, 2021. The first verse is:

 

“Up in the morning
Work like a dog
Is better than sitting
Like a bump on a log
Mind all your manners
Be quiet as a mouse
Someday you'll own a home
That's as big as a house”

 

Chapter 17 – Professional Speechwriting: Metaphor, Simile, and Theme by Lynn Meade in her Advanced Public Speaking book has a discussion of similies (and more on metaphors).

 

The mouse cartoon came from OpenClipArt.

 

An article on stage fright by David Pennington claimed public speaking was the #1 fear in a Chapman Survey, but ignored their nine other surveys where it was ranked from #26 to #59.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an article by David Pennington at LinkedIn Pulse on May 19, 2025 titled Stage Fright Is a Liar. In it he claims that:

 

“A study from Chapman University found that public speaking is America’s #1 fear, even ahead of heights, snakes, and drowning (Ref. 1).”

 

His reference is the:

 

“Chapman University Survey on American Fears, 2014 – 2022”

 

Two things are wrong with these claims. The first is that speaking only was reported as the #1 fear for the dozen in the Phobias subset from the 2014 survey. Those results were in an article by Christopher Ingraham in the Washington Post on October 30, 2014 titled America’s top fears: public speaking, heights, and bugs. But David never mentioned results from the later Chapman surveys for 2015 to 2022.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The second is that there also were Chapman Surveys done in both 2023 and 2024. I charted all the data for percent fears of public speaking via two bar charts (shown again above) in a post on December 5, 2024 titled Psychotherapist Jonathan Berent fumbles some statistics about social anxiety and fear of public speaking.

 

Ranks for public speaking in all ten of those surveys (for percent Very Afraid plus Afraid) were:

 

2014       #1

2015       #26

2016       #33

2017       #52

2018       #59

2019       #54

2020/21  #54

2022       #46

2023       #53

2024       #59

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On January 10, 2021 I blogged about how The opening paragraph of an article on public speaking earns two pinnochios for telling us lies. Along with a Phobias category that 2014 survey also has eight fears about Crime, as also are shown above in a bar chart. For Crime the question was: How afraid are you of being victimized in the following ways?; while for Phobias the similar question was: How afraid are you of the following? For both there were the same four possible answers: (Very Afraid, Afraid, Somewhat Afraid, Not Afraid At All). One of those (identity theft/credit card fraud) was feared by 49.7% of Americans, or almost twice the 25.3% for public speaking.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another way to look at results from the Chapman Surveys is via a Fear Score which ranks how afraid people are of public speaking on a scale going from 1 to 4 where 1 = Not Afraid, 2 = Slightly Afraid, 3 = Afraid, 4 = Very Afraid. I discussed this in a blog post on November 9, 2024 titled Overblown claims about fears from investigators for the 2024 Chapman Survey of American Fears. As graphed above and shown below, people consistently were only Slightly Afraid:

 

Year    Fear Score

2014       1.920

2015       1.956

2016       1.933

2017       1.909

2018       1.947

2019       2.081

2020/21  2.023

2022       2.172

2023       2.041

2024       2.067

 

And on June 7, 2024 I blogged about A recent article about fears and phobias based on mediocre research. In that post I linked to my posts about the 2020/2021 and 2023 Chapman Surveys. Mr. Pennington’s article is another based just on mediocre research.

 

It is better to admit you walked through the wrong door than to spend your life in the wrong room

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I saw a LinkedIn post by Jade Bonacolta from a couple months ago which had a list of excellent aphorisms worth quoting from Colby Kultgen titled 20 Sentences in 60 Seconds That Will Change Your Life:

 

 1]  Your new self will cost your old self.

 2] Ambition without action becomes anxiety.

 3] You get 4,000 weeks if you’re lucky – stop waiting.

 4] The most dangerous addiction is the approval of other people.

 5] You teach people how to treat you by what you tolerate.

 6] Your worth isn’t tied to your productivity.

 7] ‘No’ is a complete sentence – you don’t have to justify yourself.

 8] The people who matter won’t leave you for having boundaries.

 9] ‘The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.’

10] Reach out to people just because they crossed your mind.

11] Vera Wang designed her first dress at age 40 – it’s never too late to start.

12] If it costs you your peace, it’s too expensive.

13] Discipline is choosing what you want most over what you want now.

14] Action creates motivation – not the other way around.

15] Don’t take criticism from someone you wouldn’t take advice from.

16] Fear doesn’t stop death – it stops life.

17] Notice the people who bring out your favorite version of yourself.

18] Be addicted to your passions, not your distractions.

19] If it’s out of your control, it deserves to be out of your mind.

20] It’s better to admit you walked through the wrong door than spend your life in the wrong room.

 

The twentieth also appeared as a sign on a post in the Public Speaking Group by Tony DeMeo.

 

The door was adapted from a cartoon at OpenClipArt.