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 81 of The KellyGram!

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In This Issue:

• Fun with Words
• The Quote Corner (Attitude)
• Sound Advice for Writers!
• Much Ado About Not Much!
• Smile Awhile
• Odds and Ends
• The Last Word

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FUN WITH WORDS

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What do the following words have in common:

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

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THE QUOTE CORNER (Attitude)

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Our attitudes control our lives. Attitudes are a secret power working twenty-four hours a day, for good or bad. It is of paramount importance that we know how to harness and control this great force.
    Tom Blandi

The worth of a man is revealed in his attitude to ordinary things when he is not before the footlights.
    Oswald Chambers

Attitude is the mind's paintbrush. It can color a situation gloomy or gray, or cheerful….In fact, attitudes are more important than facts.
    Mary C. Crowley

A chip on the shoulder is too heavy a piece of baggage to carry through life.
    John Hancock

The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.
    William James

Could we change our attitude, we should not only see life differently, but life itself would come to be different. Life would undergo a change of appearance because we ourselves had undergone a change of attitude.
    Katherine Mansfield

Hardening of the attitudes starts long before hardening of the arteries.
    William A. Marsteller

Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens. Circumstances and situations do color life but you have been given the mind to choose what the color shall be.
    John Homer Miller

A strong positive mental attitude will create more miracles than any wonder drug.
    Patricia Neal

A great attitude does much more than turn on the lights in our worlds; it seems to magically connect us to all sorts of serendipitous opportunities that were somehow absent before we changed.
    Earl Nightingale

Your attitude about who you are and what you have is a very little thing that makes a very big difference.
    Theodore Roosevelt

The meanings of things lies not in the things themselves but in our attitude towards them.
    Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Eagles come in all shapes and sizes, but you will recognize them chiefly by their attitudes.
    Charles Prestwich Scott

It is not your aptitude, but your attitude, that determines your altitude.
    Zig Ziglar

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SOUND ADVICE FOR WRITERS!

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I read very little fiction so, when I came across the name E. Annie Proulx (Proo) in a recent issue of The Writer's Almanac, it meant nothing to me. However, I quickly discovered that she's an award-winning novelist, whose first novel, Postcards, published in 1993, earned her the PEN/Faulkner book award. She was the first woman so honored.

She followed that up a year later with The Shipping News, which brought her both a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

No stranger to writing, she had been a successful freelancer for many years before becoming a novelist. What captured my attention in the item I read was this advice for writers, both wannabees and veterans:

"Spend some time living before you start writing. What I find to be very bad advice is the snappy little sentence, 'Write what you know.' It is the most tiresome and stupid advice that could possibly be given. If we write simply about what we know we never grow. We don't develop any facility for languages, or an interest in others, or a desire to travel and explore and face experience head-on. We just coil tighter and tighter into our boring little selves. What one should write about is what interests one."

In previous issues, I've recommended The Writer's Almanac. To subscribe to this free daily ezine, visit http://americanpublicmedia.publicradio.org/programs/.

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MUCH ADO ABOUT NOT MUCH!

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There's been lots of promotional fuss over the last couple of months about a supposed milestone in linguistic circles, with one organization claiming it has identified the one-millionth word to be added to the English language. Tah Dah!

There were a number of candidates identified by the Global Language Monitor (GLM), an obscure Houston-based organization which, according to its web site, "documents, analyzes and tracks trends in language the world over, with a particular emphasis on Global English."

This organization's criteria for consideration for such a dubious distinction include: "a minimum of 25,000 citations with the necessary breadth of geographic distribution and breadth of citation."

And the winner — drum roll, please — is "Web 2.0." We're not sure how the combination of a word and a number was honored as a word, but such hair-splitting seems of little consequence to Paul J.J. Payack, GLM's chief wordsmith (or, perhaps more accurately, wordandnumbersmith).

In fact, Payack told one interviewer that among the finalists for this honor was the word "noob," meaning someone new to the gaming community. Payack informed the interviewer, who had questioned the designation of "Web 2.0" as a "word," that the choice of "noob" might also raise an eyebrow or two, because the two middle "letters" in that runner-up are actually zeros! Thus we have "n00b" as number 999,999.

Back here on Planet Earth, a good friend and fellow wordsmith has indeed coined a new word as the title of his brand new book. It may not have been cited 25,000 times as yet, but it likely will very soon. We'll tell you all about it in our next issue, and will leave you with one small clue: there are only two other English words (at least in any dictionary I own) which begin with the same two letters as this new one. Stay tuned!

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SMILE AWHILE

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Editor's Note: This year, we celebrate National Grandparents Day on September 13, and we picked the following quotations in honor (sort of) of the occasion.

The best baby-sitters, of course, are the baby's grandparents. You feel completely comfortable entrusting your baby to them for long periods, which is why most grandparents flee to Florida.
    Dave Barry

About a month before he died, my grandmother covered my grandfather's back with lard. After that, he went downhill very quickly.
    Milton Jones

My grandmother was a very tough woman. She buried three husbands and two of them were just napping.
    Rita Rudner

My grandfather was cut down in the prime of his life. My grandmother used to say, "If he had been cut down 15 minutes earlier, he could have been resuscitated."
    Mark Twain

My grandmother is over eighty and still doesn't need glasses. Drinks right out of the bottle.
    Henny Youngman

When I die, I want to die like my grandmother who died peacefully in her sleep — not screaming like all the passengers in her car.
    Author Unknown

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ODDS AND ENDS

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Back Issues:

All previous issues of The KellyGram, dating back to January 2003, are available on our website: http://www.wordcrafters.info/back_issues.html.

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FUN WITH WORDS

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Here's the answer to this month's puzzle:

By deleting the letter "s" from each word, new words are formed.

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THE LAST WORD

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"The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, the education, the money, than circumstances, than failure, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill...The remarkable thing is we have a choice everyday regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day."
(Charles R. Swindoll)

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© 2009 by Bob Kelly. All rights reserved.