Closed captioning 2

After the last post, I found another lovely misuse on a caption. This one occurs a great deal in speech as well, so I thought I'd bring it up. You'll find it in the confused word pairs section of my book Talking Your Way to the Top.

Desperate Housewives voiceover caption: "What she didn't know was that the Calvary was on the way."

I don't think so. Let's look at the words being confused here: Calvary and cavalry.

Calvary is the place where Jesus was crucified.

Cavalry means troops that fight on horseback or in armored vehicles.

Usually it's the cavalry that rides to the rescue, not the Calvary. That place hasn't moved in millennia.

Because I was reading the caption and not listening to the voiceover, I'm not sure what was said, but I'd put down money that the reader got it right and the caption writer was the one who didn't know the difference. But someone in production should have been watching. Oversight seems to be lacking in the caption world.

Have to love closed captioning

Last night, as I was I was "reading" my TV to keep from wakening other members of the household, I saw an interesting ad caption. The product advertised was Nyquil. Three rather doltish characters were discussing another person's symptoms, which the caption indicated might be a result of his having "hoof in mouth disease."

This is a public announcement to the makers of Nyquil. If you're going to caption your ads, which you should, you also should make sure the captions are correct. There is no such disease as "hoof in mouth," unless a cloven-hooved animal has made a significant oral faux pas. Although humans may certainly have "foot in mouth" disease, animals have hoof and mouth disease.

And, by the way, hand-foot-and-mouth disease, which is common in children and not serious, is not related to hoof and mouth disease, which occurs in animals and can be fatal.

So, Nyquil folks, take your feet out of your mouths and fix the caption.

Back at the same old stand

Forget that Grammar Granny business. There already is a Grammar Granny online. Who knew? I didn't until I stumbled across the Web site. So I'm staying right where I am. Online life can be so confusing.

Write it right or don't write it at all

A few months ago, I wrote a post on the perils of using foreign phrases you don't understand (or may understand, but don't know how to spell). I found a beaut of an example on a Web site. The blogger wrote that someone had that certain "gene sa qua."

I believe she meant "je ne sais quoi," the French phrase meaning "I don't know what," and usually understood to mean an indefinable positive quality.

The usage was correct, but the writer didn't take the time to look it up and made herself look silly.

Online dictionaries make the task of choosing the right phrase quick and easy. Be memorable, not laughable.

A change in direction

As of today, I'm writing two blogs. The newer one, The Grammar Granny (http://grammargranny.blogspot.com), will deal with grammar and usage issues I've sometimes covered in this space. This blog now will be devoted to issues about writing, publishing, the state of English today, and other more philosophical topics. I'll still throw in those goofy turns of phrase I hear so often, but if it's straight grammar and usage that interest you, try The Grammar Granny.

Hope to see and hear from you in both places.

A laugh ... sort of

A little vacation, a busy time at work, and before you know it, a month has gone by. So I thought I'd ease my way back into the blog world with a marvelous example of fractured English I found this morning. A local school official was talking about the caliber of students who are attending a new science and technology-related school. As he put it, "There's some evidence to suggest there that we weren't creaming off the crop." (Italics mine)

Could the good administrator mean that the school isn't attracting the cream of the crop? I think so, but it might have been best for him to say so.

Earlier this week, my eye was drawn to a communicators' Web site on which the subhead for a story mentioned a contributor's "pension for anger." I didn't know pensions were available for unattractive states of mind. I'm happy to say that the next day, the headline had been rewritten with the offending word--pension--replaced with penchant, which serves the purpose much better.

Bated v. baited

If you mean you're waiting with great nervousness or trepidation for news, please write the word "bated." It's a cousin of the word "abated," which means "lessened. " So "bated breath" means that you have less breath; you're holding your breath with anxiety or tension.

In this context, if you write "baited breath," I'm going to assume you have a worm on your tongue. And wonder why.

Obviously, this word pair isn't a problem in speaking, since the two words are pronounced the same way, but in writing, getting it wrong can make you look not so smart.

Political correctness hits new heights of idiocy

In my last post, I didn't mention one of the British towns that the Local Government Association chastised for their substitution of the phrase "idea shower" for the word "brainstorm." The members of the town council had decreed the new phrase because they felt that people with epilepsy might be offended by the term "brainstorm." Strange to say, when members of the area Epilepsy Association finally were asked for their opinions, they stated that "brainstorm" didn't bother them at all.

It's good to be sensitive, but it's always best to go to the source if you don't know what to say. That's what happened years ago when we were unsure about the word "handicapped." When associations that served that population were asked what to do, they came up with what they called "people first" language, that is "people with a disability." Years and years ago, the first association that served those with cerebral palsy said that they perferred "affected by" rather than "afflicted with" cerebral palsy.

Yesterday on campus I heard a middle school student who was attending a camp there refer in all seriousness to a young man she was working with as "vertically challenged." He was shorter than she by far, but I noticed there was no word for her "condition." Is she "vertically superior?" "Vertically enhanced"? He's short. She's tall. That happens in middle school. Kids know it. They may be uncomfortable about it, but we don't have to wrap them in cotton and speak in code about a simple fact.

Could we just use common sense? Of course, we want to call people what they want to be called, but fashions wax and wane, and not everyone prefers the same term. If you don't know, ask the person what he or she would like. Does she prefer "African American" or "black"? Does he mind if you refer to him as a "diabetic" or would he rather you say, "My friend has diabetes"?

We have become so afraid of offending one another that we often avoid meaningful discourse altogether. As I read about George Carlin's death--the man who noticed that in his lifetime "toilet paper" had become "bathroom tissue" -- I thought about what a field day he would have with "idea shower." He certainly had a wonderful ability to skewer the whole PC parade, and I hope that in his memory, we might all become more linguistically honest.

Hooray for our British cousins

Last Friday, the Local Government Association in Great Britain told British civil servants to banish the buzzwords. One hundred words, including stakeholders, synergies, coterminosity, revenue stream, and empowerment, should be excised, the Association says.

Well, hallelujah! May I suggest that American business take a leaf from this book and immediately banish leverage, paradigm shift, planful, impactful, point in time, presenteeism, repurpose, radar screen, off-peopling, low-hanging fruit, messaging, mission critical, granularity, human capital, enterprise, drive and driver, bandwidth, actionable (except in its legal sense), at the end of the day, skill set, seamless, value proposition, value add, and many more. If we can stop wasting our time thinking up meaningless, self-conscious "business" phrases, perhaps we can back to doing actual business.

A past tense confusion

Last week, I listened to the US ambassador to Zimbabwe discuss the deteriorating political scene in that country. He said that one of the embassy employees, a native of Zimbabwe, had been "drug from his car and beaten."

Of course, the most important aspect of this report was the description of lawlessness that has gripped the country. However, the ambassador needs to learn that the past tense of the word drag is dragged, not drug.

Drug is a noun meaning a medication or substance that affects the nervous system in various ways. It's never a verb. Although sometimes heard in colloquial speech, using drug this way can make you sound like a rube--and I'd expect more precise speech from one of our ambassadors. English is supposedly our national language, so our representatives should speak it well.

Scott McClellan's mistake

And I don't mean being press secretary to George Bush. I mean what I heard him say this morning while being interviewed about his new book What Happened. When speaking of President Bush, McClellan mentioned the great respect he held "for he [Bush] and his advisors."

No, Scott. For is a preposition. Correct usage dictates a prepositional object: "for him and his advisors." I don't think you ever would have said you had great respect for he, so, as I just said in a blog post a few days ago (which I guess you didn't read), if you wouldn't say it in the singular, don't say it in the plural either.

Is this mistake up there with some of the doozies of the past few years? Of course not, but it's the kind of error a former White House press secretary shouldn't make.

"Lay" and "lie." Why is this so hard?

I've resisted writing this post for a long time, but when I heard a colleague say that she had "lied in the sun," and she didn't mean she was outside telling an untruth, I figured it was time. This word pair is the one that is most often messed up, and myths abound about which is right and in what context.

I recently heard a radio call-in argument about the subject, and the host obviously had no idea which was correct. When a caller said that "things lay and people lie," the host said that was good enough for him and closed the discussion. How unfortunate that the caller was wrong. Things lie all the time. And people lay things. So let's start at the top.

Lay means "to put or place on a surface" and always requires an object--something put or placed. For example:

• I'll lay these reports (object) on the credenza in your office.
• When you've finished, lay your test booklets (object) in the box by the door.

If you use lay, you have to lay something. That's why, "I'm going to lay down for a while" is incorrect. There's nothing put or placed. However, "Now I lay me down to sleep" is correct because there's an object: me. However, in most cases we don't say, "I'm going to lay myself down," so lie is the correct word.

Lie means "to recline" or "to be positioned," and it doesn't take an object.

• Sue has to lie down in a dark room when she has a migraine.
• At this time of day, the sun lies just below the horizon.

When you want to talk about what happened in the past, the proper words are laid and lay.

• I laid the sweater (object) on the chair a couple of hours ago.
• Joe laid the report (object) on my credenza last week, but I can't find it.
• Sue lay down until her headache went away.
• The reports lay on the credenza for a month before anyone got around to reading them.

And the past participle (don't worry about the name; this isn't a grammar test) of these two words are laid and lain.

• I've laid the reports (object) on your credenza.
• I'd lain down for only a couple of minutes when the phone rang.

The present participle forms (the -ing form) are laying and lying.

• I'm laying tile (object) this morning.
• Don't call after noon. I'll be lying down. Tile work is exhausting.

The same rules apply to set/sit and raise/rise.

Set and raise always require an object. Sit and rise never have an object. For some reason, people don't have quite as much difficulty with these two as they do with lay/lie, although in my neck of the woods, I often hear, "Set down and make yourself comfortable." Here's how to use these word pairs.

• Please set the plant (object) in the corner.
• Please sit down.
• We'll raise the flag (object) at dawn.
• Please rise for the national anthem.

Because these words are misused so often, saying and writing them correctly may feel odd at first. Persevere. It's OK to be right.

A moment of shameless self-promotion

A Love for Learning: Motivation and the Gifted Child has been named an Arizona Best Book (education category) by the Arizona Book Publishing Association. And it also has won an Indie Award of Excellence (which honors books from independent publishers and small presses), once again for best education book. Carol Strip Whitney and I are very pleased and gratified. This book is for parents, grandparents, teachers, principals, counselors, psychologists, pediatricians, and anyone else who deals with gifted kids, both in school and out. It's easy to read and gives a lot of information about why gifted kids lose their motivation to learn in school--and what to do about it. The title is much more intimidating than the text. Before these two honors, the book had won an iParenting Award of Merit, so it's pretty heavily stickered!

One family

I'm going to digress from my usual preachments about usage and better English today. It's been a terrible few days for our fellow humans around the globe. Yesterday, a friend who has family in China sent me some pictures of the devastation that accompanied the earthquake. One picture struck me. It was Chinese firefighters resting before they went back to the grim task of trying to find survivors in the wreckage. They were identical to the pictures of American firefighters during and immediately after our own tragedy on 9/11.

There was also a picture of a woman holding up a crudely printed sign bearing the names of loved ones who were missing. Again, an eerie parallel to what we saw in New York.

And yesterday, I heard the most riveting radio I've listened to in a long time. An NPR reporter in China followed a couple who were looking for their son and his grandparents. I couldn't turn it off, even though it was horrifying when they found all three bodies. The survivors' grief was overwhelming--and universal. I cried just as I did when our own people were weeping.

If there ever has been a time when I felt the unity of the human family, it was through those pictures and that audiotape. And our family in Burma is also suffering; it's just being hidden from us.

What this all has to do with what I normally write about is this. When we are cruel in our words and actions, we're hurting ourselves, too. Because these truly are our brothers and sisters. We may eat different food, observe different customs, worship differently. But if the planet and life on it are to survive, we must be civil to one another. In words and in actions.

I'm "completely" fed up

My drive to and from work each day gives me such fodder for this blog. During the last 10 days, there was a cyclone in Myanmar and an earthquake in China. These are horrible tragedies, but the reporting about them is sometimes a little overwrought.

The word that causes the most trouble in the reports from those on the scene (or "on the ground," as the reporters like to say) is "completely." The village is "completely empty." I maintain that there's no degree of empty; something is empty or it still has something (or someone) in it. "Completely" isn't necessary to make the point.

Same thing with "completely destroyed." If something is destroyed, it's gone. Kaput. Finished. No need to qualify it. And "complete devastation"? Devastation paints the picture all by itself.

Simplicity carries the day and also makes the reporting more interesting and effective.

I'd like to ...

A few posts ago, I mentioned how the phrase "is designed to" clogs up the flow of writing. Here's another that does the same thing: "like to, " as in, "We'd like to introduce our new product."

This phrase makes it seems as if introducing the product is but a faint hope, a wish, a desire. It's almost as if there's a corollary: "We'd like to introduce our new product (but we can't)."

If you'd like to do something, do it. Say it. Own it.

• "Here's some information about the newest generation of widgets."
• "Introducing our new widgets."
• "The latest in widgets is here today. For you."

Isn't that stronger than, "We'd like to tell you about our new widgets"? (If only we could ... sigh.)

Business writing is full of these weak-kneed construction; they're as invasive as kudzu. To keep your verbal garden healthy, stamp out "like to" today.

The pitfalls of other languages

Yesterday I was reading a very nice professional Web site. One of its pages included a feature about branding, which, of course, is a hot topic again. This particular site said, "...an attractive logo and tagline that can be slapped on to stationery and signage, and viola, we have our brand."

Viola? I believe the writer was looking for the French word, "Voila," as in "lo and behold." (There's also an accent over the "a" in this word, but I can't get symbols into this post).

If you want to spice up your business collateral, posts, advertising, or other written product with a foreign phrase, careful proofreading is essential. If you're not attentive to making sure the word is the right one--and spelled correctly--the writing can sound foolish at best and insulting or obscene at worst.

Au revoir!

The reign in Spain

There's an interesting car commercial running now. It states that "Joan of Arc reigned only five years." Really? I was unaware she ever reigned. As a matter of fact, Joan's fondest desire was to put someone else on the throne. There's no doubt that Joan had a significant influence on the course of history, but she wasn't a sovereign, and she didn't reign.

Recently, I saw a similar use of this verb in the context of a college president's "reign" over the campus. I know academic regalia is cool, but it generally doesn't confer royal power. That's why college presidents are installed during an inauguration rather than a coronation.

English is a language of subtleties, and, to me, "reign" as a verb has the connotation of kingly (or queenly) rule. As an adjective, though, "reigning" often has the opposite connotation, meaning commonplace or popular, as in the "reigning" opinion or fashion of a particular time.

One more thing to remember is the spelling of reign v. rein. A "rein" is part of a bridle, used to hold a horse in check. However, I can't tell you how many times in the past few weeks I've seen the phrase "to reign him/her/it in." The right word in that context is "rein" because it means to exercise control over something or someone.

And don't forget to take your umbrella when it reigns.

A pair of troublesome word pairs

It seems I'm picking on professors lately. That's not my intent, but they're interviewed a lot on public radio, which I listen to during my half-hour commute to work. I heard a gaffe from one recently that surprised me; since then, though, I've heard it several more times (it's funny how these things seem to come in waves). The professor was talking about the weather and referred to "climactic" conditions.

Sorry, professor, but thanks for playing. The word he was looking for was "climatic," which means pertaining to climate. "Climactic" would, of course, mean pertaining to a climax. For example:

• The environmentalists were concerned about several recent climatic changes.
• John was late and missed the climactic moment of the play.

And one more. Could we please, please distinguish between "serve" and "service"?

"To serve" means to meet the needs of another, such as a customer.

"To service" means to maintain. It also can mean to bring a stud to a female for breeding.

So whenever I hear, "We service our customers, " I wonder if perhaps the company might be going a bit too far. A simple handshake is probably all that's necessary.

I guess someone thought that "serve" was too pedestrian and "service" more high-toned and elegant. But, in fact, "serve" serves just fine.

Be a better writer 1

I've been observing a recent trend, and I can't imagine how it started. I'm referring to placing a comma before the verb in a simple sentence. Here are a couple of examples ripped from the headlines, as they say. Actually, they're from big websites, the authors of which should know better.

• This recipe, makes 24 servings as an appetizer.
• The author's background, qualifies her to write with authority about this subject.

Huh? There's no need for a comma in either of these sentences. If there were some explanatory details between the subject and verb, a comma might be necessary. For example:

• This recipe, which came from my aunt's cookbook, makes 24 servings.
• The author's background, which includes 15 years as a gynecologist, qualifies her to write with authority.

I think writers do this because they aren't sure what the rules for commas are. They scatter them like snow throughout a piece of writing; the result is often a mess that's hard to read and harder still to understand.

The rule is subject-verb, not subject-comma-verb.

Equally bad

I was listening to the radio on the way to work when I heard a professor being interviewed about two writers. He stated that one wrote "equally as well" as the other.

Nope. Equally as well is redundant. What the good professor meant to say was that one wrote as well as the other or that they were equally good writers.

Like this:

• Emma and Sam are equally talented violinists.
• Emma is as talented as Sam.

Or:

• Jack is as tall as Michael.
• Jack and Michael are equally tall.

There's no need to pack the sentence with both equally and as. For clarity and precision, choose one or the other.

Word pairs still troublesome

Yesterday I received one of those "healthy living" magazines from a local hospital. It contained an article about rehydrating after exercise. The doctor is quoted as saying, "Follow a regular fluid regiment." Because the writer or the doctor (or both) chose the wrong word of a similar word pair, the sentence doesn't make sense.

A regiment is a military unit of two or more battalions. However, a regimen is a specially prescribed course, usually related to diet or exercise. And a regime is the government in power.

The embarrassment potential for misusing these words is high because many people know the difference between regimen and the other two. If you're confronted with a troublesome word pair or triplet, your best friend is a dictionary. These three words--regime, regimen, and regiment--follow each other, so it's easy to check which one to use.

It's all about design

How many times in the last seven days have you heard or read in an ad, on a Web site, or in business collateral, "Our product (or service) is designed to ..."

• Make your life easier
• Save you time or money
• Improve your relationships
• Make you more attractive
• Solve your problem

Well, I don't care what it was designed to do. Does it actually do it? If so, say so. "Our product..."

• Cuts your cooking time in half
• Reduces wrinkles 95 percent in three nanoseconds
• Makes it easy for you to pay yourself first

If something is only designed to do something, it sounds as if it might fail. And if it does, that's somehow the customer's fault. "Well, it was designed to work. You must have done something wrong."

"Designed to" gives you some wiggle room, to be sure, but it also plants doubt in the customer's mind. Be bold. If your product works, stop waffling and stake your claim.

Drop these. Their time has passed.

Have you noticed some expressions that are creeping toward serious overuse? Once they seep into the water we hear them constantly, and they begin to lose their power and punch. Look out for:

• "A perfect storm." What this appears to mean is that all conditions are lined up to create an inevitable result. You'll hear the expression now related to politics (Clinton-Obama), economics (the housing downturn), the stock market, the energy market. The list grows every day. Keep an ear cocked for this one, and think twice before using it. People are getting tired of it.
• "It is what it is. " Well, of course it is. How could it be anything else? But when you use this one in business, you don't sound professional. You sound like an aging hippie or a mystic--and you aren't communicating anything of value.

The next few posts

Colleagues around my office have been asking me a lot of usage questions lately, so I think I'll address some of them.

Let's start with pronouns.

Which is correct?

• Give the report to she and her boss.
• Give the report to her and her boss.

If you answered "she and her boss," you're making a mistake that's more and more common. No matter how common, however, it's wrong. It's a big, honking mistake, and you run the risk of sounding, how shall I put it, less capable than you probably are.

Without getting into the grammar of the situation, which involves the use of objective and subjective pronouns--and that can be a yawn--let's just look at the way to solve the problem.

Would you say, "Give the papers to she"? Probably not. Then don't say "she and her boss." If you wouldn't say it in the singular, don't say it in the plural.

Let's try another.

• Her and I are going skiing.
• She and I are going skiing.

Same test. Would you say "Her is going skiing"? No. So don't say it just because the subject is plural. I repeat, if you wouldn't say it in the singular, don't say it in the plural.

Simple. Here's a little rhyme to help you remember:

"When plural pronouns give you doubt.

Take one away; then try it out."

You'll speak and write more confidently--today.

Too long away

I've been fighting a very strong and resilient flu bug, but am now, as my mother used to say, "able to sit up and take slight nourishment." Don't forget your flu shots, folks.

So I'm back, and this morning came across a full-page ad in a national women's magazine. It was an attractive piece for a skin care "system." (We don't have products anymore; we have systems and solutions.) The ad was overwritten, flowery, full of rhetorical questions--standard stuff for skin care puffery--and bad advertising for all those reasons. However, what first caught my eye was a big, fat mistake in one line: " Then harnessed its' power in a line of of skin care products ... ."

Here comes a bold, authoritative statement. There is no such word as its'.

There is a word it's, which means it is or it has, as in, "It's been a long time since I've been to Paris," or, "It's odd she hasn't called."

There's also a word its, which is the possessive of it, as in, "The alligator opened its eyes," or, "The product's advantage is its rounded edges."

But to use the possessive and then add an apostrophe to make that possessive possessive is, to say the least, overkill. In this case, its power would have been more powerful without the extra punctuation.

On reading further, I came to the next silliness: "After using these products for 28-days ... ." There's no need for a hyphen. Just 28 days. Later in the ad, the copywriters used the hyphen correctly when they spoke of a 28-day period. In that case, 28-day is being used to modify period and calls for a hyphen. But in the fine print of the guarantee, they went back to, "... you'll see a difference in 28-days," so obviously, they don't know there's a distinction.

What's sad about this is that the client put his or her trust in a copywriter who didn't have the skills to write a basic, error-free ad. And no one on the client side knew any better, either, because someone from the company had to approve this substandard offering for display in national media.

Which tells us something about the state of English education in the United States. I can hardly wait to see the advertising in the year 2020. I think it's possible it will be even less coherent than today's--and that doesn't bode well for product sales in the future. Too bad.

Eat and die

Sometimes words that sound nearly alike have quite different meanings, and you can embarrass yourself when you use them incorrectly. For example, the words gourmand and gourmet both refer to food, but one of them is laudatory and the other is insulting. A gourmet is a person who is knowledgeable about food and appreciates fine cuisine and wine. A gourmand, on the other hand, is a hog. A glutton. Someone who will plow his or her way through whatever's on the table. So it's probably not a good idea to refer to the boss as a gourmand.

Recently, I've seen considerable confusion in another word pair: interment and internment. To inter is to bury. To intern is to confine someone to a specific location, such as a camp, usually during a time of war. So an interment is a burial and an internment is a type of imprisonment.

While I suppose we could argue that someone who's dead is imprisoned in a coffin-sized space, that's a bit of a stretch. Better to get it right than to try to talk your way out of that one.

Sometimes You Just Have to Laugh

It's giggle day around the office. I just read a wonderful description of a piece of real estate that's recently been offered for sale. The house features a private garden with a paver patio and a "coy pond." Well, that's refreshing. So many ponds these days are overbearing and pushy. Koi perhaps? As in carp?

Here's another amusing example of a proofreader's being asleep at the switch. According to an article in The Washington Post, the cholesterol drug Vytorin "didn't help slow the build-up of ... plaque in a long-awaited study." I didn't know the study was plagued by plaque. I think Vytorin is supposed to clean plaque out of arteries. A spokesman for the company says, "more favorable results" would have been preferable. Yeah.

It's not always hot

It's time to gang up on an overused word: hot. Cars are hot. Women, too. Men as well. Clothes. Shoes. On and on. The first billion times advertisers used the word, it might be been fun, amusing, sexy, trendy--or perhaps even hot. But now hot has become tepid, lukewarm, and irritating. If you're over 21, it's a word you might want to think about retiring--or at least mothballing until it comes around again in another 25 years.

Cool lasts forever. Hot doesn't.

Adding more

I've decided to claim this blog with Technorati and see what happens. Technorati Profile

Looking forward to more fun, more words, more conversation.

No matter how you try....

In the last post, I talked about "ethic" slurs. Hmmm. I wonder what those might be? Of course, it's "ethnic." I correct other people's mistakes for a living. It's just delightful to have to correct my own--in public.

However, there are Web site and blog issues more serious than typos. I read one site yesterday that went on for a bit and then began its last sentence, "Anyways." Deliver me from the final s in that one. Nonetheless, I soldiered on to the next page where the content read,"We're just chalk full of ideas." Chalk full? The only time I've even been "chalk full" was when I had to swallow barium for an x-ray. I don't recommend it.

"Chock" perhaps? As in full to the brim with ideas? That's better.

I gave a workshop today, the gist of which was that if you're not certain of the spelling or meaning of a word, for heaven's sake, look it up. Take a minute to do it right so you don't waste 10 minutes cleaning up the lousy first impression you made.

Civil Speech? Where?

In the past few days, I've been roaming various comment boards on an array of different Web sites. This is not something I usually have time to do, and now I have another good reason not to waste my time with it. These boards, with the exception of those who cater to a specific set of highly articulate readers interested in issues of substance, have become places for people to spill vast amounts of bile. When people disagree here, they don't resort to reason. They resort to character assassination, name-calling of the most vile type, ethic and racial slurs that make my head spin, bullying, and all-round nastiness.

Barack Obama wins in Iowa? Let's get on the Web and call him everything from a Communist to the N-word to a Muslim extremist bent on destroying the United States. And, of course, let's be sure not to let our invective be tempered by even rudimentary fact checking. Let's just spread our lies as fast as we can.

Britney Spears has a breakdown? Let's kick her while she's strapped to a gurney in an ambulance. Let's blame her for all the world's ills. And while we're at it, let's all state the "absolute facts" about what's happened to a young woman we've never met. Beside having excessively bad judgment, what has she done to unleash such a torrent of hateful diatribes? Has she hurt any of the people who now call on her to "do us all a favor and die"?

Behind the cloak of anonymity, people feel safe to say anything they wish. What's sad, though, is that this kind of speech is now no longer cloaked. Emboldened by what they get away with online, people say whatever they want, wherever they want, to whomever they want. It's road rage with words, assault with speech, and it goes all the way down to elementary school. If you haven't been on a 5th-grade playground lately, it's an education.

I don't have the answer, but I can urge all of us to think before we use speech to harm another, judge another, or make another's life miserable.