Yesterday morning, I’m in my downstairs office and I get an e-mail about a lead. It sounded interesting, so I call the number from the office phone and the receptionist puts me through to voicemail. I leave a message with my number and I go back to work.

Ten minutes later, the business line starts to ring, and then cuts off immediately. And I hear my cellphone ringing. Upstairs. Egad! I hadn’t turned the call forwarding off from the day before.

Wanting to maintain the illusion of professionalism, I charge out of my chair, race up the steps, stumble on the steps, grab the railing, get to the top, and make the hard left down the hall and into the living room. I manage to get to the phone just before it goes to voicemail. I hope I sounded normal and not like I had just pulled several muscles that usually don’t have that kind of strain put on them. I made it and we had a productive conversation.

Should I look for a liniment app or just work out more often?

I offer two written items, one from my Twitter feed and the other from my Facebook page. A very pleasant husband and wife team of sales specialists and authors of the book “Selling Naked on the Phone” tweeted me asking for my favorite sales tip. I made my answer a two-parter. For communication: Make sure your communications are phrased and spelled properly because you never know who’s paying attention. For Selling Naked on the Phone: Avoid wicker.

For my trouble, I got a question back from them: What’s wicker?

I had the same problem on Facebook.

A “humorist” posted the question while promoting her video, “Does anyone have back pain?” My comment: “Nope, I’m all caught up.” Their response: “???” This surprised me because one of the characteristics of a humorist is being able to look at things from a different angle. This “humorist” wasn’t being very flexible.

Aside: Because of her question marks, I broke one of my cardinal rules and explained the joke. I commented, “Back taxes. Back alimony. A little joke.” Haven’t heard from her since.

If a statement is funny, it should get laughs whether it’s written or spoken. But just as there will always be someone who doesn’t get the joke in the form of the spoken word, the same is true in writing. And I understand that.

But wicker? Really?

You know what it is. I just trotted it out again in a recent article, but here it is in a nutshell. People think that in order to qualify for writer status, they have to be this solitary soul in a cold water walk-up shivering in a ratty bathrobe while hunched over an antiquated Underwood at 3:00 in the morning, pecking out the great American novel with an overflowing ashtray at one hand and a jelly glass of rotgut hooch at the other. Not true. The bathrobe is optional.

I’m joshing, of course, but those of you who give presentations, speak at Rotary luncheons, or give keynotes at conferences are writers. Unless you farm out the task to someone else — and I really doubt you do that — you are the creator of your work. And that means you wrote it.

You might not consider yourself a writer, but you do write. Get over it.

Read more about being a writer here. Turns out it’s not as solitary as you think.

One of my favorite topics to speak about is indeed writing. If your group or organization needs a speaker, call or send an e-mail. I could talk about writing for days, but I’ve been known to keep it as short as 30 minutes.

Contact me.

For the uninitiated, Parade is one of those supplements to the Sunday paper that most people ignore. Like the dimensions of the newspaper it’s tucked into, it has shrunk over the years. In fact, if it gets much smaller, they’ll have to change the name to Single File. I look at it out of habit and rarely, if ever, read an article. But I do read “Ask Marilyn.”

Marilyn Vos Savant is very smart and usually has something interesting in her column. Often, though, the entries have to do with impenetrable number puzzles: If a train leaves Pittsburgh at 10:00 traveling 60 MPH and another train leaves Boston at 10:15 traveling at 50 MPH, how many oranges will fit on a Frisbee? I leave them alone. But today was different.

The question a reader asked was if you wrapped a 25,000-mile-long band snugly around the Earth (assuming a flat Earth) and then spliced an additional 50 feet to the length of the band, would you be able to fit your finger under the band? The answer is yes, and then some. Turns out adding 50 feet to the band would result in the band floating eight feet from the surface of the planet.

Even more interesting, adding 50 feet to a band surrounding any round object, from a planet to an orange, will result in the same eight-foot distance from the surface. Golf ball, basketball, hot air balloon, Mars: add fifty feet, same eight foot gap.

The question is to what use do I put this nugget of info? This was probably it.

Any suggestions?

One of the sessions was conducted by a woman whose name and credentials are lost in the blur. She went around the room asking us why we were there and what our backgrounds were. A sixty-ish man said he wanted to write a novel and eagerly explained his qualifications to do so by including the fact that he had read 50 books.

Not just 50 books on writing. Or 50 books researching the subject of his novel. 50 books total. In his whole life. Nobody said anything… except the presenter. She gave a rambling reply to the man, of which I remember only this: She looked at him and said, “Fifty books is nothing.” 

Cold, right? To the gentleman’s credit, while he deflated a tad, he hung in there.

Aside: To me, part of the impact of the man’s statement was the fact that he didn’t say “Almost 50 books” or “More than 50 books.” The figure was 50 books on the nose. That tells me the poor guy had been keeping count and he had reached the magic number. Onward.

The speaker said what we were all thinking but didn’t want to say to the poor guy. It was true that, for a would-be writer or anyone who purported to be a person of letters, fifty books was indeed nothing. But she handled it wretchedly.

Maybe she wanted to save him from failing by not even trying.

Maybe she was appalled that someone could have read so few books over the course of 60 years.

Or maybe she was just unfeeling and rude.

Regardless, there were better ways to say it. Then again, this woman was not a professional speaker. Rather, she was a writer and, therefore, unaccustomed to frequent human interaction.

A good speaker never sets out to embarrass an audience member. Never. Unless you’re Don Rickles, and I’m betting you’re not. (Besides, it’s a well-documented fact that people go to a Rickles show hoping he’ll pick on them.) Audiences put themselves in your hands, and when they reveal things that go counter to the tenets of your topic, you need to find a way to correct them gently.

If you’re verbally agile, you can do it in front of the rest of the audience. Or you can take the person aside after the presentation or during a break, and talk to them out of earshot of the rest of the group. And even then you’ll be nice about it.

Standing at the front of the room, you have an effect on the individual emotions of the audience members. Challenge them, sure. Change their perceptions, certainly. But do it in a way that leaves them feeling not diminished but enhanced.

Have a heart.

Jay Speyerer is both a speaker and a writer, so he comes with solid credentials of frequent human interaction. Visit www.jayspeyerer.com to find out how to get out of the way of your own language so you can say what you really mean.

20- and 30-somethings in one on-line forum are staunchly for the elimination of the peculiar little n-dash, but I really doubt many of them know what the e stands for anyway. Now I’m all for updating and modernization, especially when it comes to my business image. I do not want to be the fellow who, to this day, has his contact information on his website listed in the following form:
phone
fax
electronic mail

(I forget his name and wouldn’t tell you if I knew it, but I swear I’ve seen it. It’s bad enough he has his fax number listed. Full disclosure: my fax number is on my business cards, but I’m trying to use them up and then re-order.)

As a student of language in general and languages in particular, I’m fully aware that a living language changes over time based on popular usage. Dictionaries are descriptive sources, not dictating the meaning and spelling of a word, but rather reflecting the majority usage. 700 years ago, the word nice meant foolish, a fact I relate in some of my seminars. But it wasn’t the result of a committee like the Academie Francaise issuing an edict. Rather it was a gradual evolution of meaning over the years.

 Since the e stands for electronic, to my mind, that makes it a compound word. As such, it requires a hyphen. I acknowledge I’m in the minority considering the fact that a Google search brings up 4.5 million hits for e-mail and nearly twice that number for email. This points to a solidification in favor of the latter choice, but I say what’s the hurry? My goal in writing is to include no usages that will blur clarity by slowing down the reader and raising questions about  my content. To my mind using the hyphen raises fewer, if any, questions.

 The Chicago Manual of Style still advocates use of the hyphen. Guess they’re as old-fashioned as I am.

For more in-depth articles, visit my Tips & Articles page, where you can access some of my archived columns.

I just received a cordial invitation from a friend of a friend to be his “guest” at a dinner and discussion. At least that’s what the first paragraph said. Later on, the text got around to divulging that the event was being held to raise money for a political campaign and the price of “individual participation” is $500.

That’s a fairly elastic interpretation of the word “guest.” I wonder how much I would have had to fork over if I hadn’t held that exalted rank. The first paragraph is nothing short of misrepresentation to get me to keep reading, only to find out it was just another rubber chicken fund-raiser.

Don’t fall into that trap lest your emails be automatically thrown to the wolves.

Riff. Jam. Improvise. Noodle on your instrument like a jazz musician. But what is my instrument, you ask? It’s not what you think. 

Computer keyboard or typewriter? No, that’s just what you use to write things down and preserve your improvisations. Liken it to a tape recorder to hold on to the gems you came up with so you don’t lose them. 

Vocabulary? No again; words are the arsenal, the supply closet, the quiver of arrows. Words are comparable to the notes that you combine in new configurations to create a brand new melody. 

Your instrument, you see, is your mind.

The nineteen in nineteen-fifty was short for nineteen hundred. Since no one says twenty hundred, case closed. It’s two-thousand-eleven. 

And while we’re at it, let’s clear up the fact that 2011 is the first year of the second decade. If you thought 2010 was, do me a favor: count to ten. If you started with one and not zero, you agree with me. Thank you very much. 

We’re also using words the wrong way again. I mean still. Amazing and awesome should refer to things and events that are so transcendently grand that they soar the the realm of the unbelievably wonderful. Instead, they’re being used to describe a taco. What are you going to say when something truly awesome and amazing happens?

“Oh my god, aliens landed on the mall in Washington, D.C., and gave the president the cure for aging! That’s– That’s – delicious!”

Please stop. That would be awesome.

First, 21-year-old Lulu shuffles off this mortal hairball, and now I have another medical dependant of the feline species. Labor Day weekend was no fun for me and less for Fleck, since she spent the whole weekend in the hospital. Turns out you can tell a cat has diabetes by the fact that they get sick and dehydrated, even though they drink enough water to float a veterinary clinic.

Much money and worry later, she is now back to normal, and at a much healthier weight. Two insulin shots a day, and she takes them in stride. The scruff of the neck is the best injection site, as I explained to my own doctor as I prepared to evaluate his shot-giving technique. After he tried to give me my flu shot in the same place, I abandoned any implied critique.

From a Darwinian perspective, it makes sense that the back of a cat’s neck would have evolved fewer nerve endings because that’s where the mom grabs the kittens to carry them around. Who knows, maybe they did have nerves there long ago. But if it hurt, the kittens would have run away from mom and consequently run the risk of being eaten. But the kittens born with no nerve endings were protected and lived to pass those genes along to their kids. Survival of the fittest in the pure sense.

When I’ve told people how good Fleck is about getting her shots, some have said that she probably knows instinctively that I’m doing it for her own good. I prefer to think it’s my medical skills, but I suppose it’s possible. Those “skills” must not be without flaws, however, because sometimes she flinches and pulls away.

I’m certainly not perfect at using a syringe because I accidentally stuck my finger one morning. After I drew two units into the syringe, I attempted to put the orange cap back on over the needle to keep it sterile until the cat was finished eating her breakfast. Well, somehow the needle went through the plastic cap and into my finger. No damage — except for a hero-sized drop of blood — and no injection of insulin into me, but I wasted a syringe in the process. Apparently, I need to drink a full cup of coffee before doing this in the future.

A house cat who’s actually smart enough to know what’s good for her? No more of a stretch than what follows.

One day as I watched a DVR recording of the previous night’s episode of The Daily Show, I was abruptly brought out of my lunchtime trance by the sound of loud hammering on my roof. Were worker elves replacing shingles without my knowledge? I went out the front door and looked up to see two crows’ tailfeathers sticking out over the gutter. They were industriously and energetically pecking at something, and making one hell of a racket doing it. I’ll bet I know what they were working on: corn.

The critter food I put out has kernels of dried corn among other delectables, such as nuts and seeds. The corn must be a little too hard and dry because, more than once, I’ve seen a crow pick up kernels and bring them over to the birdbath where it purposefully drops the corn into the water. After several seconds, the bird picks the corn out of the water and begins to peck at it.

It’s been said that the mark of intelligence in an animal is its ability to use tools. It’s obvious the crow wasn’t using the water to wash down the corn like a vitamin pill. Rather it was using the water as a softening medium to make the corn more edible. That’s using a tool as far as I’m concerned.

Later two elements converged to prove the crow-using-tools theory: winter weather and procrastination. I didn’t get the birdbath stored away before a freeze, and now it’s frozen over. I had tossed out a piece of stale pita bread and a crow snatched it up. Must be the same crow because he picked up the bread and flew over to land on the edge of the birdbath. Are you ahead of me? That’s right, the bird dropped the bread onto the ice.

Obviously, the softening trick didn’t work for the poor guy, so after a moment’s bewilderment, he just started pecking away. But we know his intent, don’t we?

There you have it: proof that some crows are as smart as some cats. But if any of those crows come down with diabetes, they’re on their own.