The KellyGram

Wisdom and Wit About the Wonderful and Often Wacky World of Words

Published by Bob Kelly

Resident Wordsmith and Quotemeister

WordCrafters, Inc.

www.wordcrafters.info

Providing the Right Word for Speakers, Writers, Ministry Leaders, Business Executives and Just Plain Folks – since 1979!

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Welcome to Issue 73 of The KellyGram!

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With this issue, we mark the start of our seventh year of publishing The KellyGram, and the beginning of our 30^th year in business. Over the years, we've experienced a lot of "ups," along with a few "downs." We've had lots of fun along the way, and we look forward to more of the same this year. We thank you for your support and we hope and pray that, in spite of current economic conditions, you will enjoy a bountiful and blessed 2009.

Whatever you do, don't buy in to all the gloom and doom we keep hearing about. As we start a new year, maybe this is the time to consider making some changes in your life and/or in your business.

Of course, there are always "reasons" we can find to preserve the status quo. Some of those "reasons" might be:

• Because we tried it once, and it didn't work.
• Because someone else tried it, and it didn't work.
• Because it's never been tried before.
• Because we've never done it that way.
• Because we've always done it this way.
• Because if it ain't broke, we're not going to fix it!
• Because we don't want to rock the boat.
• Because we can't afford to risk it.

Clearly, those aren't "reasons," but excuses and, as someone once noted: "An excuse is the skin of a reason, stuffed with lies." Instead of making excuses, let's consider this advice from Latin poet Ovid, written 2,000 years ago: "Change is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast. In the pool where you least expect it, will be a fish."

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In This Issue:

• Fun with Words
• The Quote Corner (Change)
• The Preposition Position
• Name Game Nuttiness
• Wanted: Bad Writing
• Smile Awhile
• Odds and Ends
• The Last Word

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FUN WITH WORDS

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A number of famous wordsmiths (authors, poets, playwrights) were born in January. Your challenge is to match their names, listed in the left column, with the clues we've provided in the right column.

You'll find the correct answers elsewhere in this issue.

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THE QUOTE CORNER (Change)

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If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude. Don’t complain.
    Maya Angelou

Our days are a kaleidoscope. Every instant a change takes place in the contents. New harmonies, new contrasts, new combinations of every sort. Nothing ever happens twice alike.
    Henry Ward Beecher

Change is a process and not a destination; it never ends!
    James Belasco

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
    Henri Bergson

Since changes are going on anyway, the great thing is to learn enough about them so that we will be able to lay hold of them and turn them in the direction of our desires.
    John Dewey

If you don't like the way the world is, you change it. You have an obligation to change it. You just do it one step at a time.
    Marian Wright Edelman

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
    R. Buckminster Fuller

We must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise we harden.
    Johann von Goethe

Men change, fashions change, conditions and circumstances change, but God never changes.
    Billy Graham

Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; what we really want is for things to remain the same but get better.
    Sydney J. Harris

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
    Aldous Huxley

If one is going to change things, one has to make a fuss and catch the eye of the world.
    Elizabeth Janeway

When people shake their heads because we are living in a restless age, ask them how they would like to live in a stationary one and do without change.
    George Bernard Shaw

Change is always hard for the man who is in a rut. For he has scaled down his living to that which he can handle comfortably and welcomes no change – or challenge – that would lift him.
    C. Neil Strait

You can’t change circumstances and you can’t change other people, but God can change you.
    Evelyn A. Thiessen

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THE PREPOSITION POSITION – PART TWO

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In our September 2007 issue, we tackled the age-old myth about never ending a sentence with a preposition. Now, Anu Garg, who publishes an excellent daily ezine, A.WORD.A.DAY, has reinforced our position. In a recent entry, she wrote:

"A note about ending a sentence with a preposition. Some believe there's something wrong with that. It's a myth. One can find sentences ending with preps in the lines of some of the finest writers in history: Chaucer, Swift, Kipling, Shakespeare and so on. 'We are such stuff as dreams are made on' – Try rephrasing that line from The Tempest. See what inelegant glob results. This canard about no-prepositions-at-the-end belongs in the same dustbin as 'Thou shalt not split an infinitive.'

"So the next time people fault you for ending a sentence with a preposition, ask them: 'What are you talking about?'"

As I recommended last month, you can subscribe to this ezine at www.wordsmith.org.

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THE NAME GAME: THE NUTTINESS GOES ON!

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Some time ago, we reported on what appeared to be a developing fad, especially among so-called celebrities, to saddle newborns with rather unusual and bizarre names.

What brought this to mind now was a recent Associated Press report about a New Jersey couple named Campbell and their three-year-old son, whom they had named Adolf Hitler. What caught the media's attention was the refusal of some local markets to decorate a birthday cake with the boy's name, and the swastika his parents had requested. We suspect the day will come when Adolf may not be too thrilled about what Vater und Mutter did to him when he was too little to fight back. He might well be, shall we say, fuhrer-ious with them.

Another recent name in the news was that of Chad Johnson, who plays football for the Cincinnati Bengals. In the National Football League, players are required to have their last name and uniform number on the back of their jerseys. When Johnson's request to replace his name with his number – in Spanish – was turned down, he went to court and had his last name legally changed to Ocho Cinco. We wonder what Chad Ocho Cinco is likely to do if he's traded to another team and assigned a different number.

In case you think this nuttiness may be new, we recently came across a statement by Malcolm Forbes, publisher of Forbes from 1957 until his death in 1990. In the December 22, 2008 issue, he was quoted as follows: "A Ms. Named Cooperman asked a New York State Supreme Court justice for permission to change her name to Cooperperson. He threw the case out, saying that the next thing might be somebody named Manning wanting to change her name to Peopling and perhaps a gal named Carmen might want to be called Carperson." Forbes made that comment more than 32 years ago!

Maybe the Campbells' little pride and joy will grow up to be a professional football player and change his name to Adolf Hitler Fünfundachtzig (for the non-linguists in the audience, that last word is German for Ocho Cinco or, in English, 85.)

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LET'S HEAR IT FOR BAD WRITING

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Each year, the Department of English & Comparative Literature at San Jose State University conducts its annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Launched in 1982, the contest, as described on the university's web site, is an international literary parody contest, which honors "the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels…Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the "Peanuts" beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, "It was a dark and stormy night."