The KellyGram

Published by Bob Kelly

Resident Wordsmith and Quotemeister

WordCrafters, Inc.

www.wordcrafters.info

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In This Issue:

• The Quote Corner (Wisdom)
• This Language of Ours
• Getting Real (Part 2)
• Linguistic Absurdities
• Smile Awhile
• Back Issues
• A Final Word

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THE QUOTE CORNER (Wisdom)

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Learning sleeps and snores in libraries, but wisdom is everywhere, wide awake, on tiptoes.

Josh Billings

It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look further than you can see.

Winston Churchill

Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The older I get, the more wisdom I find in the ancient rule of taking first things firsta process which often reduces the most complex human problems to manageable proportions.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.

Felix Frankfurter

The vintage of wisdom is to know that rest is rust and that the real life is love, laughter, and work.

Elbert Hubbard

Make wisdom your provision for the journey from youth to old age, for it is a more certain support than all other possessions.

Diogenes Laertius

Besides the art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.

Lin Yü-tang

It requires wisdom to understand wisdom; the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.

Walter Lippmann

The most manifest sign of wisdom is a continual cheerfulness.

Michel de Montaigne

We dont receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey no one can take for us or spare us.

Marcel Proust

The wise will always reflect on the quality, not the quantity of life.

Seneca

The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.

Charles H. Spurgeon

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THIS LANGUAGE OF OURS

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One of the things I like best about this language of ours is its flexibility and adaptability. Take, for example, the term "shut up." Long used as an abrupt and rude demand for silence, and banned in most civilized households, it seems to have donned more respectable garb in recent years. According to a Wall Street Journal article, "People use it just as much to express disbelief, shock and joy as to demand silenceThe most effective enunciation places a full stop between shut and up [and] excitable types pitch their voices higher on the word up." Apparently, its become the latest way to say, "No way," or "Youve gotta be kidding."

An excellent example of the constant ebb and flow of our language is the 11^th edition of Merriam-Websters Collegiate Dictionary, released in 2003. Among its 165,000 entries are 10,000 new words which have been added since the publication of the 10^th edition a decade earlier. For the math majors among us, thats a thousand new words a year, and that doesnt take into account those that disappear from our language. And the total number of words has more than doubled since the first edition appeared in 1898.

These rapid changes in the English language make it a fascinating one for any word lover. Recently, a friend of ours came across an old volume entitled, Seven Thousand Words Often Mispronounced, and was kind enough to send it along. Compiled by one William Henry P. Phyfe, a member of the American Philological Association, it was published in 1890.

Wed never encountered hundreds of these words, so we decided to check a half-dozen of them to see if they had survived a century of change and were included in the newest Merriam-Webster. The six words we chose were clough, dinarchy, dotard, helot, houyhnhnms and psoas.

To our great surprise, three of those words are still listed. Care to guess which ones? The first is dotard, defined as "a person in his or her dotage, a period of senile decay." (Why are you looking at me like that?)

The second is helot, defined as "a member of a class of serfs in ancient Sparta." Last, houyhnhnms were the names of horses endowed with reason in Swifts Gullivers Travels.

As for clough, dinarchy and psoas, we dont have a clue, but dont worry; youre unlikely to hear them. However, in case you do, you might give Shirley MacLaine a call. She may have run across them in an earlier life, and will know what they mean.

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1. Unless your eloquence rivals Ciceros and your intellectual brilliance rivals

da Vincis dont think of speaking as a goal think of it as one tool among many tools with which you can accomplish your lifes purpose.

2. You are not likely to get rich speaking; you can get rich solving problems. The more wide-spread the problem you know how to solve, the richer youll be.
3. Choose your models carefully then be yourself. Do not copy them!
4. Follow different "masters" for different purposes. Choose one for marketing, one for story telling, one for writing, etc.
5. Dont manufacture an identity gimmick! If youve never worn feathers and fringes before becoming a speaker, dont start now just so youll look different!
6. Let your "topics" and "subjects" be defined by your lifes purpose; not the other way around. First know the Peak Purpose ™ of your life and most other things will fall into place.
7. Spend at least 1/3 of your time becoming a true expert in at least one area. Non-experts wont be major players in the future.
8. What we lack more than anything else in the professional speaking world is originality and original thinking and research. Come up with something new!
9. Build your brand around your solutions; not on your topics.
10. Create your promotional material from a clean sheet. Be original. You dont have to do it like everyone else! If your innovation doesnt work, then try another. You just might come up with a better idea and well all be copying you!
11. One of the best investments you can make is how to write sales copy. Learn to write persuasively so people cannot help but take action.
12. Please do not write a book for the sake of having a book. If you have nothing to say, dont write! An article in Fast Company suggested that half the books people like us write should never have seen the light of day and only half of the rest are really worth reading.
13. Oprah isnt going to help you.
14. Call a CAB! If you are going to write a book, form a Content Advisory Board to honestly, intelligently and critically review your book before you publish. Pick people who dont even like you and will happily tear your book to shreds. Sadly, some people ask for "endorsements" before their book is even written and some dont even bother with an editor.
15. Keep your Internet presence as simple and solution-oriented as possible. Save the bells and whistles for those who are selling bells and whistles.
16. Ask to see concrete evidence of revenue increases before hiring marketing and PR advisors. These are sexy businesses and the stars you get in your eyes can turn out to be awfully expensive.
17. Recognize the NSA is not a good source of business. Were all looking for work, just remember that. Please dont send your ezine or newsletter to other speakers unless they have specifically asked you to do so.
18. Form strategic alliances with others offering complimentary and compatible solutions. Speakers tend to be loners to a fault and we lose a lot of work and revenue by not forming strategic alliances with others on our own level.
19. Get yourself a business development strategy. You have only so much money and time. Thoughtfully lay out just what steps you are going to take to build your business, what those steps are going to cost you, and what you can expect by way of return.