I'll Be Your Server

 

I’ll Be Your Server

Gordon: Thanks for agreeing to be interviewed today about your blog, “Three Hundred Words With Gordon Jackson.”

Alter Ego: My pleasure.

Gordon: But isn’t this approach of interviewing yourself rather predictable? Clichéd, even?

Alter Ego: Yes.

Gordon: Oh. Well, let’s begin. Why did you settle on “300 words” for this blog?

Alter Ego: Good question. But first I’d like to mention that I have a new book out. It’s titled I’ll Be Your Server. It’s a series of brief reflections on servants in the Bible.

Gordon: What’s that got to do with 300 words?

Alter Ego: Well, the reader of the book will get a lot more than 300 words.

Gordon: How many?

Alter Ego: 37,109. All of them carefully chosen.

Gordon: Good. But I’d like to get back to our topic of your blog.

Alter Ego: Yes, yes—of course. But let me mention briefly that there’s an introductory section that describes the difference between the role of a servant in general and that of the Christian servant. Then, there’s a case study of Jesus as a servant, followed by the 34 individual studies of servants whose contributions are recorded in the Bible.

Gordon: We’re running out of words here. We’ve got only about 120 left for this blog entry.

Alter Ego: First, there are the well known servants, like David, Mary and Moses. Also the Archangel Gabriel, the only non-human servant mentioned. He’s especially interesting because he terrifies everyone he appears to.

Gordon: But about 300 words…

Alter Ego: Other well-known servants include Martha and her sister Mary and the innkeeper who doesn’t have room for Joseph and the pregnant Mary.

Gordon: And lots more who aren’t well known, yes?

Alter Ego: Yes. Like Eliezer and Malchus.

Gordon: But about your blog…

Alter Ego: You mean our blog…

[300 words]

 

A Course of Anti-Ambiguitals

 

A Course of Anti-Ambiguitals

[All these examples of misunderstood wording are real and recent.]

Doctor: “So what brings you here today?”

Me: “Well, doctor, English is my first language. Really, my only language. But I keep finding that I don’t understand things. It gets embarrassing.”

Doctor: “Can you give me an example?”

Me: “Sure. My wife and I were at a restaurant recently and saw a sign that said, ‘Please wait for the host to be seated.’”

Doctor: “Yes?”

Me: “Why were we supposed to wait for the host to be seated when we were the ones wanting seats?”

Doctor: “I see.”

Me: “Interestingly, he never did sit down. Here’s another example. On a recent flight I read in the safety instructions that seatbelts should be worn at all times. But mine looked quite new, and hardly worn at all. I asked the flight attendant if I could have a worn one and she didn’t seem to understand. Got quite snippy about it, actually.”

Doctor: “Hmmm…”

Me: “Then there was the visit to my local CVS pharmacy where they had a sign that said, ‘We have 15+ Vaccines.’ I asked the pharmacist if ‘15+’ were some new strain of COVID 19 or something similar. She didn’t understand what I was talking about. I persisted, though, and asked if my insurance covered the vaccine for 15+. She said she’d have to look into it.”

Doctor: “How long have you had this problem.”

Me: “As long as I can remember. Here’s another example: I got a T-shirt from a physiotherapist who treated me. It has the slogan, ‘Changing lives one injury at a time.’ Aren’t they supposed to be healing people?”

Doctor: “I think you might benefit from a course of anti-ambiguitals.”

Me: “Thank you.”

Doctor: “One suggestion: Get someone else to read you the directions.”

[300 words]

 

Sorry, my mistake

 

Sorry, My Mistake

Before it slips even farther into the past, let’s revisit the experience of Tom Craig at the Paris Olympics. He was a member of the Australian field hockey team and was arrested for buying cocaine. He later apologized and said, “I made a terrible mistake.”

That’s also the word used by the person in charge of all Australia’s athletes at the games, Anna Meares. She said, among other things, that “he has owned up to his mistake.” But she still sent him home.

Here’s a fellow who decides to buy cocaine. He seeks out a seller. He pays the going rate. All purposeful, voluntary actions. Then he says he made a “mistake.”

A mistake is inadvertent, unintentional, like when I write the wrong date on a check. Or when I try getting into the wrong car at the mall because its identical to mine.

If you catch me breaking into your house, are you okay with me saying, “Sorry, my mistake”? Or what if I say I meant to break into the house next door? “Sorry, my mistake.”

Here are the four ways Merriam-Webster defines “mistake,” with examples.

1.      To blunder in the choice of [mistook her way in the dark]

2.      To misunderstand the meaning or intention of [don't mistake me, I mean exactly what I said]

3.      To make a wrong judgment of the character or ability of [The army's leaders mistook the strength of the enemy]

4.      To identify wrongly, confuse with another [I mistook him for his brother]

Then there’s the sense in which Craig used the word, which was, “I displayed mind-blowingly appalling judgment, but if I call it a ‘mistake’ maybe people will be more forgiving.”

I might be more forgiving if he had later said, “I made a mistake when I said ‘mistake.’”

[300 words]

Word Kill

 

Kill Your Darlings

Any writer can put words on a page or a screen. But good writers know which ones to kill.

Let’s look at five realms of redundancy.

Bureaucratic Speak: Here’s an example from a British government report. “What I have said has demonstrated that it is very difficult to find an answer to that question, but if pressed for an answer I would say that, so far as we can see, taking it rather by and large, taking one thing with another, and taking the average of departments, it is probable that there would not be found to be very much in it either way.” How about, “It’s a toss-up”?

Dead words: Words that are fine in speech kneecap our writing: Very (I once had a student use “very” fourteen times on one page), really, actually, etc.

Email: What could be cut in this exchange?

·         I’ve attached the agenda for tomorrow’s meeting.

·         Thanks.

·         You’re welcome.

·         We’ll talk more then.

·         Sure.

·         Look forward to it.

·         Me too.

·         Take care.

·         And you.

Will someone strangle those two?

[I don’t text, so I am spared the horror of those individuals who feel compelled to send a “like” to every text they receive.]

General Bloat [not to be confused with Major Disaster, Corporal Punishment and certainly not Private Parts]: Some examples, with possible solutions:

·         in the event that = if

·         regardless of the fact that = though

·         under the circumstances in which = when

Personal Bad Habits: We all have words with which we’ve fallen in love, our darlings. They serve as default fillers when we’re not writing thoughtfully. When I’ve finished a draft I’ll follow the writing advice of whoever said “kill your darlings” (apparently Arthur Quiller Couch) and launch a search and destroy mission against simply, just, and indeed.

Down with needless redundancy!

[300 words]

Clarity, Originality, Simplicity

A recent edition of The Economist had a spoof advice column in its business section, with this question and answer.

My manager often says that “we need to go to the balcony.” Everyone else nods, but then they don’t actually go anywhere. As far as I can see our office doesn’t even have a balcony. In a meeting the other week one person said “this is a two-finger point” and the person running the meeting replied “let’s double-click on that later.” I have no idea what is going on half the time. What can I do to keep up?

Just hang in there. Incomprehension is an enormous part of office life. You will eventually develop a sense of what phrases like this mean. In fact, you will eventually start saying this kind of rubbish yourself and someone else will write to me about you.

And now, my 300 word response…

Clarity, Originality, Simplicity

This blog is two years old. The first post was on July 3, 2022. If you’re still reading, thank you. (If you’re not, well, you’re not.)

So here is my vision for the next two years. Eyeballing the blog’s performance to date, it’s clear when I run the numbers that the blog has yielded a synergistic blend of low-hanging fruit coupled with a curated product that consistently delivers even more than 110 percent.

Following what I am confident were best practices, and without moving the goalposts, I have tried to bring to the table the blog’s underlying core competencies, or strengths: words! Using words as leverage, then, despite lots of moving parts in a robust competitive environment that is the blogosphere today, more than once I’ve had to engage in blue sky thinking as I’ve circled back to prioritizing the blog’s key takeaways.

In mid-2023 I had an aha moment—something of a game changer, you might say—when without reinventing the wheel I realigned the blog’s key performance indicators to better gain traction as I sought enhanced reader buy-in. And the bottom line? You, dear readers, are the deliverables.

Always aspiring to utilize cutting edge digitization opportunities, I ran a beta version up the flagpole in November last year. Results were mixed. Initially, I accepted that it is what it is and was tempted to leave everything on the back burner. But, to my surprise, as the re-envisioned approach broke down the silos that impacted the blog’s performance, I grasped what could be achieved by thinking outside the box. The bandwidth we needed was there all along.

You can be assured that the core values securing mission alignment will sustain this blog going forward. You can be assured of the clarity, originality, and simplicity you have come to expect.

[300 words] 

More Easier

 

More Easier

            This morning I corrected a young woman who said something was “more easier.” Not so, I said; it was either “easier” or “more easy.” Used as an adjective, I told her, one could say a task was “easy/easier/easiest.” (“Easy” can also be an adverb, a noun or even a verb, according to Wiktionary…)

            I don’t normally correct people’s speech, tempted though I am. (I once corrected the grammar on a consent form before having a root canal.) This woman, however, welcomed the correction and explanation. She was a native Russian speaker, a refugee who has been in Spokane for a year and she and I were at the Barton School, a language program at First Presbyterian Church in Spokane.

I’ve been volunteering there for about eight months, interacting with students from around the world. Some are beginners; others, like my student, already have credible spoken English. Many are refugees; others are in the US for family reasons. What they have in common, though, is a commitment to improving their English fluency. The courage, patience and perseverance of these students is humbling. I cannot imagine waking up one morning in a country whose language was totally alien to me. My mind often goes back to the summer of 1992, when thanks to a Whitworth University grant I spent six weeks in Guatemala learning Spanish. I still recall the frustrations I had learning the grammar, especially a mysterious thing called the subjunctive, and not pronouncing words correctly. Fortunately, my well-being didn’t depend on speaking Spanish. The Barton students, though, have no choice but to try and master our devilishly difficult, illogical, inconsistent language. (Just think how we pronounce ough in cough, tough, through, thorough, dough, thought and drought.)

Yes, English is a difficult language. If only it were more easier.

[300 words]

 

 

Word Perfect 

I’ve been working with an editor on my latest book, I’ll be Your Server, a series of reflections on servants in the Bible. As we go back and forth on placement of commas or singular versus plural verbs, I’m aware that we’ll not catch everything we should. I’ve increasingly accepted that there are no perfect books. All my books, and I assume all other books as well, have errors: typos, grammatical mistakes, incorrect word usage, or whatever.

My son, Matthew, is an excellent proofreader. He invariably catches numerous errors in my drafts. But even he doesn’t catch everything, and within about 17 minutes after opening my latest book, he can be guaranteed to find at least one more elusive typo. Sigh…

This leads to acute schadenfreude [pleasure at someone else’s misfortune] when I discover the typos of others, and I’m reminded of their humanity—and mine.

Three examples. A music organization in Spokane proudly advertised its upcoming “12-hour continuous recital.” Unfortunately, they omitted the “i” in “recital.”

The Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, at the University of Texas in Austin, published its commencement brochure describing itself as “The School of Pubic Affairs.” The School duly issued an apology for what it termed its “eggregious typo.”

Then there is the so-called “Wicked Bible,” published in 1631. It proclaimed in Exodus 20:14 that “Thou shalt commit adultery.”

I’ve recently read Dreyer’s English, by the former copy-editing chief of Penguin-Random House, Benjamin Dreyer. He notes how difficult it is to attain perfection in editing and even he continues to find errors in books that he has edited.

Writers and editors are uncomfortably aware of the first part of Alexander Pope’s line, “To err is human, to forgive divine.” But we turn to you, dear reader, to embrace the bit about forgivenes.

[300 words]