Fire and Knowledge

Matt Perman instructs us how to write better emails. In our email-dominant workplace, good email communication skills are essential. For the love of your co-workers, please read this.

Sometimes you wonder what they were thinking when they named a thing. Take the pineapple. If ever there was an object that was less like pine and less like an apple, and in nearly every respect, this surely must be it. Or grapefruit. I don’t know about you, but if someone handed me an unfamiliar fruit that was yellow, sour, and the size of a cannonball, I don’t believe I would say, “Well, it’s rather like a grape, isn’t it?”

—Bill Bryson, I’m a Stranger Here Myself (Broadway Books: 1999), p. 267.

When looking at my Wells Fargo bank account online, I noticed the link “Send Us Suspicious Email.” I thought that was an odd request, but I went ahead and did it since they asked.

Recently found on a new purchase:

Notice: This article meets the flammability requirements of California…. Care should be exercised near open flame.

Abraham Piper, a friend and co-worker, just started a blog called 22 Words. Every post is twenty-two words, just like this one.

Our words for unhealthy contamination—“soiled” or “dirty”—suggest that if we really knew the number-one ingredient of a garden, we’d all head straight into therapy.

—Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperCollins: 2007), p. 10.

People have always used clothing not only (or even primarily) for covering, but for communicating. The symbolic use of clothing is in many ways like a language, with a grammar or syntax that allows for a range of expressive acts. And what a rich language it is, with regional and demographic dialects sophisticated enough to permit jokes, ironic statements, even slang and metaphor.

What we wear speaks volumes about who we are. Our clothes reveal our age and income, our education and our social class; they reveal our current attitudes and political beliefs, our gender and even our sexual orientation. They play an extraordinary important role in mate selection. Clothing is also an extremely accurate guide to the time in which we live—notice how clothing (along with hairstyles) is the easiest way to date old photographs.

–Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), p. 163

The other day I used the phrase “the coast is clear” and wondered what it originally meant. Here’s the answer:

The phrase first appears in print in 1531 where it describes a vessel which had safely cleared the coast, then later Shakespeare used it in Henry VI as a reference to visibility. Neither of these references touch on its true insinuation; it is a reference to smuggling … or some nefarious operation. (source)