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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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Volume 8 — Number 3 March 2010
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Welcome to Issue 87 of The KellyGram!
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I’ve just learned from my friend and colleague Barbara McNichol that the National Association of Independent Writers and Editors (NAIWE) has designated this week (March 1-7) as Words Matter Week. So, in this issue, we’ll focus even more than ever on our favorite topic.
Also this week, another friend and colleague Jim Canning sent me a copy of a book titled Trash Cash, Fizzbos, and Flatliners: A Dictionary of New Words. It was published 17 years ago, and many of the words (including fizzbos and flatliners) are familiar, but hundreds are not. For example: pathography, grouser and Grumpie. Nevertheless, it’s a very entertaining and informative read, demonstrating that words, even unfamiliar ones, do matter.
(I know "grumpy" means "surly," and was also the name of one of the Seven Dwarfs. This "Grumpie" is an abbreviation for Americans "born after Word War II and schooled during the cold-war years of the Eisenhower administration." It stands for "Grown Up Mature Professionals.")
To learn more about Words Matter Week, and about the activities of NAIWE, visit www.naiwe.com.
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In This Issue:
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FUN WITH WORDS
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Speaking of the Seven Dwarfs (see above), name Grumpy’s six friends.
You'll find the correct answers elsewhere in this issue.
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THE QUOTE CORNER (Words)
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(Note: This is the third time we’ve featured quotes on this topic. They also appeared in our July and September 2004 issues, which are archived on our website, along with all other issues.)
Words fascinate me. For me, browsing in a dictionary is like being turned loose in a bank.
Eddie Cantor
I try to catch every sentence, every word you and I say, and quickly lock all these sentences and words away in my literary storehouse because they might come in handy.
Anton Chekhov
It makes little difference how many university courses or degrees a person may own. If he cannot use words to move an idea from one point to another, his education is incomplete.
Norman Cousins
I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.
Emily Dickinson
Words are timeless. You should utter them or write them with a knowledge of their timelessness.
Khalil Gibran
The power of words is immense. A well-chosen word has often sufficed to stop a flying army, to change defeat into victory, and to save an empire.
Emile de Girardin
Words have incredible power. They can make people’s hearts sore, and they can make people’s hearts soar.
Dr. Mardy Grothe
When you doubt between words, use the plainest, the commonest, the most idiomatic. Avoid big words as you would rouge, and love simple ones as you would native roses in your cheek.
August W. Hare
Words are the only things that last forever; they are more durable than the eternal hills.
William Hazlitt
Action can give us the feeling of being useful, but only words can give us a sense of worth and purpose.
Eric Hoffer
Words are the soul’s ambassadors, who go abroad upon her errands to and fro.
James Howell
Oh, words are action good enough, if they’re the right words.
D.H. Lawrence
Wordstruck is exactly what I was — and still am: crazy about the sound of words, the look of words, the taste of words, the feeling of words on the tongue and in the mind.
Robert MacNeil
Apt words have power to assuage the tumors of a troubled mind.
John Milton
Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.
John Ruskin
A single word even may be the spark of inextinguishable thought.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
(Note: These quotations are from our collection of more than 425 published volumes of quotations and 1.5 million entries. If you're looking for quotes on virtually any subject, send us an email at bob@kellygram.com, or call us at 480-895-7617. Or, if you have a quote topic you'd like us to feature in an upcoming issue, email it to us and we'll get it on the schedule.)
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REMEMBERING DR. SUESS
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We’ve often mentioned The Writer’s Almanac as one of our favorite ezines about the wonderful world of words. This week (on March 2), it paid tribute to a man who has been a favorite author of millions of children and adults, and who was born on that date more than a century ago. It’s such a great story that, in celebration of Words Matter Week, I’m including it here in its entirety.
It's the birthday of a man considered to be the most popular children's book writer in American history, the best-selling children's book writer of all time, and a man who revolutionized the way children learned to read: Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on this day in 1904.
He's the author of more than 60 children's books, including Horton Hears a Who! (1954), One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish (1960), Green Eggs and Ham (1960), Hop on Pop (1963), Oh, the Thinks You Can Think! (1975), The Butter Battle Book (1984), and of course, The Cat in the Hat (1957).
He was the grandson of German immigrants, a lifelong Lutheran, a Dartmouth graduate, and an Oxford dropout. His mom was 6 feet tall and 200 pounds, a competitive platform high diver who read him bedtime stories every night. His dad inherited a brewery from his own German immigrant father a month before Prohibition began in the U.S., and eventually became a zookeeper who brought young Theodor with him to work. The future Dr. Seuss grew up around the zoo, running around in the cages with baby lions and baby tigers.
At Dartmouth, he majored in English and wrote for the campus humor magazine. But one night he was caught drinking gin with some friends; since this was during Prohibition, it was an illegal act. The Dartmouth administration did not expel him, but as a disciplinary punishment, they did make him resign from all of his extracurricular activities, including the humor magazine, of which he was the editor-in-chief. From then on, he wrote for the magazine subversively, signing his work with his mother's maiden name, Seuss.
His mother's family pronounced it "Soise," the way it's said in Germany, but people in the States kept mispronouncing it Seuss. He eventually embraced the Anglican mispronunciation: After all, it rhymed with Mother Goose, not a bad thing for an aspiring children's book writer.
In 1937, he published his first children's book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, which he said was inspired by the rhythms of a steamliner cruiser he was on. He wrote the book, and much of the rest of his life's work, in rhyming anapestic meter, also called trisyllabic meter.
The meter is very alluring and catchy, and Seuss's masterful use of it is a big part of why his books are so enjoyable to read. The meter is made up of two weak beats followed by a stressed syllable — da da DUM da da DUM da da DUM da da DUM, as in "And today the Great Yertle, that Marvelous he / Is King of the Mud. That is all he can see."
A big study came out in the 1950s called "Why Johnny Can't Read." It was by an Austrian immigrant to the U.S., an education specialist who argued that the Dick and Jane primers being used to teach reading in grade school classrooms across America were boring and, worse, not an effective method for teaching reading. He called them "horrible, stupid, emasculated, pointless, tasteless little readers," which went "through dozens and dozens of totally unexciting middle-class, middle-income, middle-IQ children's activities that offer opportunities for reading 'Look, look' or 'Yes, yes' or 'Come, come' or 'See the funny, funny animal.'"
A publisher at Random House thought that maybe a guy named Dr. Seuss, who'd published a few not-well-known but very imaginative children's books, might be able to write a book that would be really good for teaching kids how to read. A publisher invited Dr. Seuss to dinner and said, "Write me a story that first-graders can't put down!"
Dr. Seuss spent nine months composing The Cat in the Hat. It uses just 220 different words and is 1,702 words long. He was a meticulous reviser, and he once said: "Writing for children is murder. A chapter has to be boiled down to a paragraph. Every word has to count."
Within a year of publication, The Cat in the Hat was selling 12,000 copies a month; within five years, it had sold a million copies. Dr. Seuss has sold more books for Random House Publishing than any other writer in its history.
(Editor’s Note: For a free subscription to The Writer’s Almanac, visit http://americanpublicmedia.publicradio.org/programs/, and click on "The Writer’s Almanac" link.)
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MY FAVORITE WORDS ABOUT WORDS
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For 20+ years, I’ve been collecting the annual calendars published by RAND Corporation, a Southern California-based "think tank." I do so because each page features a quotation from a broad range of men and women, contemporary and historical, representing almost every field of endeavor: politics, literature, science, religion, education, business and the arts.
My favorite selection, from the pen of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, appeared in September 1992. It remains the most magnificent tribute to words I’ve ever read or heard:
"The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone.... I did not care what the words said, overmuch, nor what happened to Jack and Jill and the Mother Goose rest of them; I cared for the shapes of sound that their names, and the words describing their actions, made in my ears; I cared for the colors the words cast on my eyes.... I fell in love—that is the only expression I can think of—at once, and am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behavior very well, I think I can influence them slightly and have even learned to beat them now and then, which they appear to enjoy."
One reason it captivated me is that it’s an exact description of how my own love affair with words began—as a very small child at my mother’s knee. It’s a love affair that continues to this day.
This selection was excerpted from something Thomas wrote called "Poetic Manifesto," first published in 1961. I decided to track down the entire piece, and finally found it. Approximately 3500 words long, it was written by Thomas in 1951 in response to a series of questions he had been asked by a research student on how and why he became a poet.
Here are a few more samples from this truly wonderful tribute to words:
"My love for the real life of words increased until I knew that I must live with them and in them, always. I knew, in fact, that I must be a writer of words, and nothing else."
"What I like to do is to treat words as a craftsman does his wood or stone or what-have-you, to hew, carve, mold, coil, polish, and plane them into patterns, sequences, sculptures, fugues of sound expressing some lyrical impulse, some spiritual doubt or conviction, some dimly realized truth I must try to reach and realize."
"I could never have dreamt that there were such goings-on in the world between the covers of books ... so many blinding lights ... splashing across the pages in a million bits and pieces all of which were words, words, words, and each of which was alive forever in its own delight and glory and oddity and light."
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THE BEST OF SUCCESS
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I’m happy to report that our new book: The Best of Success: A Treasury of Inspiration, has been well received. You may preview it at www.simpletruths.com, and order copies by clicking the following link: http://www.shareasale.com/m-pr.cfm?merchantID=17824&userID=344748&productID=468240100"
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SMILE AWHILE
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Speaking of new words, and in honor of Words Matter Week, here are a few we’d like to see added to the dictionary:
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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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Your privacy is very important to us. We assure you that under no circumstances will we share, distribute, publish, give away or sell our mailing lists or other information about you to any other party.
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As always, I welcome your support. If you've found The KellyGram to be a helpful resource, I'd be grateful if you'd send this issue along to your friends, family members and colleagues. If they'd like to subscribe — it's FREE — all they have to do is send an email to bob@kellygram.com or use the form at http://www.wordcrafters.info/newsletters.html. Thanks so much!
Comments/Questions:
Your comments and questions are always welcome. Please contact us at bob@kellygram.com, or call Bob Kelly at (480) 895-7617.
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ANSWERS TO FUN WITH WORDS
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Here are the answers to this month’s puzzle:
Dopey, Doc, Happy, Bashful, Sneezy, and Sleepy.
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LAST MONTH’S LAST WORD
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Last month, we deliberately omitted the name of the author of "The Last Word," which read as follows:
"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed. . . . People must again learn to work instead of living on public assistance."
It certainly seems to have current application, and we asked you to guess the name of the author, who was Roman philosopher and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero. The year was 55 B.C. Clearly, not much has changed in the last 2065 years.
Among the names guessed were Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Ronald Reagan, Nancy Reagan and Ross Perot, plus current political figures John Boehner, Mitch McConnell and Michael Steele.
Three of our readers submitted the correct names. They were Phil Sidotti, Anne Black and Matt Sichel. In the interest of full disclosure, and lending credence to the old saying that "the apple never falls far from the tree," I’m happy and proud to report that Anne Black is my daughter and Matt Sichel is the husband of my granddaughter Jessica. Way to go, gang!
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THE [REALLY] LAST WORD
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You may choose your word like a connoisseur,
And polish it up with art,
But the word that sways, and stirs, and stays,
Is the word that comes from the heart.
(Ella Wheeler Wilcox)
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© 2010 by Bob Kelly. All rights reserved.
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