.. or why “business people speak like idiots.”
They are selling a book, plugging their bullfighter freeware, and their blog does not have spam blocker… but they definitely have the right spirit.
You can copy and paste text in a service that will determine its”bull level”. The analysis can then be sent anonymously to the culprit.
Along with every résumé we get comes a cover letter. Composing one seems to have a Difficulty Rating of 11, since that’s where we find the most tortured prose ever set to paper. For example: “I expect the position to pay commissary to that of its value, as well as to the performance completed.”
Or, decode this:
“It is my desire to develop and generate the revolving scheme to filter to the consuming public in.”
Yes, there is more where that came from.
The power of the spoken word, especially when well-delivered and articulated, is immense; and this archive of speeches is an excellent tool to delve into the subject of rhetoric.
Studies show that the mere act of shaking hands makes people twice as likely to remember you, and with just a few quick pumps, you can say a lot about yourself: Too much oomph, and you appear domineering. Come on too soft, and exude incompetence. Fret too much, and you’re headed for a clammy clasp that’ll send your fellow shaker into instant recoil.
But the right shake, on the other hand, can convey openness, respect, confidence, and vitality. “It says ‘I’m a person of substance, I’m to be taken seriously’
More on going palm to palm here.
During our discussion on hot and cold media, some of you observed that however much more we are “in contact” with people (email, text messaging, instant messaging, etc.), we seem to be less connected. Well, a recent study confirms this.
Americans don’t have as many close friends as they used to.
We’re networking on myspace.com, sharing photos and text messaging on our cellphones, and blogging at all hours. But a major national survey being released today shows that the average number of people with whom Americans discuss important matters has dropped from three to two in just two decades, a steep falloff in confidants that startled the researchers.
The study by sociologists at Duke University and the University of Arizona provides powerful evidence for the argument that the country is becoming increasingly socially isolated even as cellphones, the Internet, and other technology make people more interconnected. The authors found that fully one-quarter of Americans say they have no one with whom to discuss their most important personal business. (link courtesy of a fellow blogger).
From the McLuhan website (in reference to an earlier post):
Actually, the title was a mistake. When the book came back from the typesetter’s, it had on the cover “Massage” as it still does. The title was supposed to have read “The Medium is the Message” but the typesetter had made an error. When Marshall saw the typo he exclaimed, “Leave it alone! It’s great, and right on target!”
Now there are four possible readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate: “Message” and “Mess Age,” “Massage” and “Mass Age.”
During last Thursday’s discussion I brought up Marshall McLuhan‘s famous quote (“the medium is the message”). Here is the explanation in the author’s own words:
Each medium, independent of the content it mediates, has its own intrinsic effects which are its unique message.
The message of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. The railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure. This happened whether the railway functioned in a tropical or northern environment, and is quite independent of the freight or content of the railway medium. (Understanding Media, NY, 1964, p. 8)
He also wrote the following in Understanding the Media, decades before the World Wide Web became a popular, well, medium:
“By putting our physical bodies inside our extended nervous systems, by means of electric media, we set up a dynamic by which all previous technologies that are mere extensions of hands and feet and teeth, will be translated into information systems. Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as befits an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide. We must serve our electric technology with the same servo-mechanistic fidelity with which we once served our coracle, our canoe, our typography, and all other extensions of our physical organs. But, there is a difference here. Those previous technologies were partial and fragmentary. The electric is total and inclusive. An external consensus or conscience is now as necessary as private consciousness. With the new media, however, it is now possible to store and to translate everything; and as for speed, that is no problem. No further acceleration is possible this side of the light barrier.”
The website run by his estate is here.
Full disclosure: He is Canadian.
Last Thursday we discussed the challenges of not letting e-mail take over your schedule and your life.
Lisa Haneberg’s post brought to my attention
these two posts from David Lorenzo. In post 1, called Making the Most out of E-Mail, he shares some new habits he is going to try to reduce the time he spends on e-mail and improve his focus. In the second post, E-mail Maximization Day 1, David tells you how day 1 went.
David’s posts offer practical suggestions to break free from e-mail tyranny, not unlike the ones that we shared in our discussion… except that his are written in a tongue-in-cheek tone.
Language has its own structure (not unchanging, to be sure, but fixed enough at any one moment to serve as both a constraint and a resource). If you do not submit yourself to the conventional meanings of words and to the grammatical forms that specify the relationships between the objects words refer to, the prose you produce will say something — language, not you or I, means — but it will not say what you wanted to say. That’s only because your readers will not be inside your head where they might ask the self-seeking expression what it had in mind, but will instead be on the outside processing the formal patterns of your written language and reaching the conclusions dictated and generated by those patterns.
In fact, however, what I’ve just said is a bit misleading because it suggests that fully formed thoughts exist in some inner mental space and manage to make it into the outside world when they are clothed in the proper syntactical and lexical forms. But as everyone used to know before the cult of self-expression triumphed, the ability even to have certain kinds of thoughts depends on the prior ability to produce (and comprehend) certain kinds of sentences. Continue reading “Speaking is NOT writing”
Here is a good short introduction to the Oracle of Omaha. Folksy and brainy has earned him a tangible net worth of over $40 billion, most of which he has just given away to charity.
Buffett’s annual letters to shareholders are priceless.
