Flight of the Bumblebaum.

Like most people in the advertising business, I almost always had a freelance job on the side.

Basically, if you're working full-time, even regularly late into the night, who can resist picking up some extra ducats here and there by tacking on a few more hours a week. I always equated the freelance while working as finding money in an old coat or in the cushions of a sofa. There's something magic about extra money.

At one point while at Ogilvy, I got called out on it. I said to the caller-outer, I haven't gotten a raise since I joined this place four years earlier. And I'm making the same money I was making when I left here the first time in 2004. With inflation rising at about 3% a year, over a decade, my salary in real dollars has actually decreased about 50%.

He backed off.

Freelance, however, when you're on your own is different. Sometimes I feel like the beleaguered husband in those old 1930s comedies who go shopping with their wives and end up carrying parcels stacked twelve or 16 feet high, teetering beneath the weight.

Back when I was a youngster, I went to some lawn party for incoming freshmen. There were a bunch of 50-year-old dads there, too, with marzipan complexions and shorts with embroidered fish on them. They were pleased and puffed up and bragging about their kids.

I remember hearing one father say, "Well, if you want something done, give it to the busy man."

It's 46 years later now--I heard that in 1975, sometime before the fricative and the great vowel shift, and I'm just beginning to understand it.

It's something, frankly, all the creative managers at agencies don't understand.

If you're in a crunch, if you're in a crisis, if you've got a CEO speech that needs writing in eleven minutes, don't give it to the person who's 37% "utilized." Give it to the person who's 337% utilized.

Sure, it's not fair.

But, I'll tell you something I've learned along the way. 

Account people know.

They almost always crave on their business the people who are busiest. Just like you'd like the busiest plumber when you have a leak. They're people who know how to get things done--so they can move onto the next thing.

A lot of friends call me and ask me how GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company is going. So many people, that I've developed something of a patter.

"I'm not really an entrepreneur," I answer. "I miss the steadiness of a paycheck every two weeks. Right now, for instance, I'm owed something on the order of $xxx,xxx. But, let me tell you what I do like. I like that the relationship between hard work and pay has been restored.

"Clients come to me. I don't say no. I get it done. The more I work, the more I get paid."

That used to be a given in capitalism. 

More work = more pay.

But it's been obliterated by a holding company system that's bent on systematizing the idiosyncratic for the comfort of people who don't understand humanity.

I always felt when I was within the four constricting walls of an agency that I could do all the work in an agency by myself. I couldn't keep up with all the revises, no. No one can. And all the 168-page decks. But if a big agency writes 100 spots a year, I could certainly do that. At 55 words a spot, that's only 110 words a week.

That's basically what I'm doing now. Working, working, working. Writing, writing, writing. Thinking, thinking, thinking. I don't dilly-dally or even eat lunch.

Work never ceases.

Occasionally, I'll sit outside between my wife's rose bushes and the sea. I'll see a fat-to-bursting bumblebee working from flower to flower. Working, then moving on.

Working, then moving on.

I feel ya, dude.

I feel ya.

2,734,233 Titantium Pencils.

I got a note from a friend on Friday afternoon. It was a day, up here on the Gingham Coast, with sublime San Francisco weather. 65-degrees with sparkling sunshine and what sailors would call a "freshening" wind. The kind of breeze that fills sails, clears the air, and billows out the diaphanous dresses of pretty girls to show off their gams to great effect.

My friend was one of the brightest lights in our industry's dying constellations and wrote me about the spate of Pencil-Contagion that's going around LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and The Witchita Daily Telegraph. It seems like everyone and his cousin is writing about the 72 pencils they've won for this or that.

The funny thing is, I consume a lot of media. And read all the annuals and advertising trade-press. I read newspapers and magazines. I watch the occasional TV show. I am an avid watcher of the industry.

In the past 12-months, the Lincoln Project notwithstanding, I haven't seen 12 good ads in total. Have you?

In fact, I have what today is called an "Eidetic memory." We used to call that a photographic memory--but that's not obtuse enough for today's standards. Stretching that memory to its fullest, I can't recall a single ad that I've really loved. Nothing as 1/2 as good as any of the ads below.

When I was a kid in the business, I would clip out every good ad I'd see and put it in a giant coffin-sized corrugated box. At the end of the year, I'd have quite a collection. Even if I were to screen-grab ads I'd like and clip print ads, at the end of an average year nowadays, I'd have four. Max.

I'm not interested in ads about hamburgers that promote the brotherhood of man. Or ads for peanut butter that salvages the rainforest. Or messages from supermarket chain that teaches coding to amputee dogs. You know what I want from brands? Ads that tell me why your products are better. 

And as for brand behavior, clean your own yard before trying to heal the world. Answer your phones. Provide a good product at a good price. Clean up the litter and trash you generate. Pay your employees. Pay your taxes. Do those things--those quiet things--and then we can talk about self-promotion. Until you do the job you're actually paid to do, don't talk to me.

I feel that way about advertising, too.  

But back to my friend. She wrote, "Proud and humbled to say that of the 276 million gold pencils handed out this week, I won zero."

"You know, Jill," I wrote back. "I never cared much about awards since 1989 and I won half-a-dozen Clios at the Clio-free-for-all-year. But now that I'm on my own, the award thing is really different.

"Now, what gets my juices flowing is different. I've always been more intrinsically geared than extrinsically oriented. I've always been more interested in what I think good is, as opposed to what judges I'll never meet think."

"I get that."

"Lately, though, something's happened. Maybe it's a function of being very close to very senior-level clients and being essentially a one-man eponymous agency. Now when I show work, clients say, 'George, thank you. This is way more than we expected.' A lot of times, I'm presenting on Zoom to a dozen people, and I literally get applause.

"I mean, clients are thanking me for building their business.

"Somehow it means more than a $12 metal pencil that 276 other people also won, for ads that never ran."

But apparently, I am in a minority.

What's most winning is faking.

Then bragging about it,

Fish on Friday.

Ah, Friends, it is Friday, is it not? 

Time to sit back, hearken back and celebrate those days when dead agencies were still alive, where low-pay wasn't a condition of employment and agencies still believed in that fatuous old slogan, "First-class business in a first-class way."

Today, that ol' chestnut has been replaced by this modern one: "Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and you'll feed him for a lifetime. Make a man head of a holding company and he'll drive the place out of business in three years."

How's that for fish rotting from the head?

With great gratitude to the unsurpassed Dave Dye (davedye.com) for designing these for me. He's a master of patience, dedication, generosity and craft. (You probably already knew that. Who else knows how to do stuff like this anymore--make ads that people actually want to read?)

Below, the full insipid collection, complete, for a limited time with typos, thanks to my inimitable idiocy! Collect 'em all.

Trade secrets.

About eight years ago when I joined Ogilvy for the second time, my therapist of nearly 40 years, Owen, scowled at me. If you've never been scowled at by a Mittel-European psycho therapist (two words) you haven't really lived. The scowl is a terrifying mixture of termagant with liberal doses of harridan and virago mixed in. It's enough to scare the pants off you, whether or not you're wearing any.

"George," Owen said, "it's time you worked for yourself."

"Naw," I replied with my usual Cro-Magnon eloquence. 

"If you had to have your own company," Owen continued at his ten-dollars-a-minute tirade, "what would you name it?"

As I do best, I answered without thinking.

"I'd name it GeorgeCo., because clients would be getting me. I realize for all the things agencies hate about having individuals on staff--their contentiousness, their moods, their mania, their disdain for petty bureaucracy--it's those things that have made every agency that's ever been successful in building clients' business while doing good work, possible."

"That's right," Owen said handing me yet another exorbitant bill.

I'm rounding into the start of my second year of GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, and while I don't love the "loneliness of the long-copy writer," I do love doing things my own way. 

Not my own way to be difficult. My own way because I know how my brain works and I've set up GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company to optimize my brain. 

Accordingly, I don't have long sets of rules, lengthy protocols and hordes of people watching over the one or two people who actually do the work. No. That's not how I work best. 

Not too long ago I had a brilliant CCO who rubbed a lot of people the wrong way because he didn't stand in the front of big rooms late at night and harangue people, ostensibly with ersatz 'win this one for the Gipper' speeches. He quietly set a very high standard. That's it.

Your job was to meet that standard--to surpass that standard. If you could do that, you were in clover. If you couldn't you were Gulag'd. Most people couldn't.

The point in all this is pretty simple.

For communication to succeed, it has to first get your attention. If it doesn't, it has no chance of ever working. 

To get your attention something has to be unique, startling, unusual. It has to be different and unexpected.

Different and unexpected.

Most agencies try to create processes to create different and unexpected. The modern ones hire dozens and dozens of people and legislate thousands of pages of strictures and protocols to make you conform to their way of doing things. 

They try to regularize the irregular. They try to Frederick Winslow Taylorize serendipity.

That's the opposite of what I'm trying to do.

I know being different comes from being yourself--if you yourself are different--and letting yourself work.

That's what I'm trying to do here.

GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, is not rules for fools.

No. It's me, listening to the smart people I work with and for. Then thinking. Usually while I walk Whiskey and sleep. Then writing. Usually 10,000 words to get ten or twenty I like.

That's it.

That's GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company. 

Not scalable. And built to stay that way.™

Word-flation. (AKA permission to suck granted.)

Back before I was an advertising copywriter I was a budding scholar of English literature and American history. Those are my true loves--surpassing my love for almost anything animate or inanimate. Wives, daughters and puppies notwithstanding.

This was back in the mid-1970s, and not unlike today, much of Western Civilization seemed to be burning. We weren't many years past deadly eruptions in major cities. We weren't far past Nixon's subversion of the Constitution and promotion of the president as monarch. We weren't past from Vietnam, Kent State and murder in the streets.

At the time, the city closest to my still-beating but essentially non-existent heart was dying--and the borough closest to that dead pump of mine was leading the way. In fewer than ten years, the Bronx saw its population plummet 20%, from 1.47 million people to 1.16 million people. Driving through the benighted borough which had been destroyed by Robert Moses' Cross Bronx Expressway, was driving through violence--anarchy. Apartment buildings were burnt out, their copper pipes stolen for scrap by addicts. A flat tire could mean death; the streets were filled with desperate people who would kill for money and the drugs they bought.

I can't find the ads now, but the Traveler's Life Insurance Company account at the time was being handled by the ad agency Carl Ally. They were creating ads that talked about the problems of the real world--with real-world language--with facts. I remember one ad in particular--which I can't find--read like a well-written article on the subject of arson. I was an academic at the time, but I read that ad and said to myself--that's the way writing should be. It's based on facts, not adjectives.

[As an aside, I have the eleven-pound--the weight, not the monetary unit--book Ally & Gargano, edited by Amil Gargano, that has many of the Travelers ads in it. Alas, it is in my New York apartment, not here in Connecticut, as I write this on a foggy Saturday morning.]

Facts, not adjectives became my beacon as a writer. Even this storyboard--not one of Carl Ally's finest--speaks to that precept. It's not one of the ads I can't find (how's that for a tautology?) but it is steeped in realism and evidence. That's how communication should be when it works its best. 

Good communication hurts sometimes. It's loud. Abrasive. Shocking. It has a voice and a point of view. It works to get noticed, to be believed. 

It doesn't rely on -ers and -ests. It proves with data and details what they're trying to communicate.

Even politics would be better off if we took some moments, as viewers--not sheep--and we asked for facts. I am a lefty teetering on the brink of Socialism. But if some merkin-haired politician said, "I am going to make America livable again by spending $1 trillion of Americans' dollars on the American people," I might have said "ok." If that tangerine-skinned phonus said, "$100 billion on repairing roads and bridges. $300 billion on universal health-care. $300 billion on improving education, both k-12 and college and $300 billion on building a green infrastructure," I'd have been ok.

If that same dwarf-handed human sump-pump gave periodic reports on the spending which included progress and set-backs

--again backed by data, I might now be comparing him to FDR instead of engaging in ad hominem attacks.

So much of the advertising we see is devoid of everything except emptiness. Today when we have more people than ever whose specific job it is to find out interesting details, we wind up  with cranial backwash like this:

We use meaningless words to describe expensive cars, like incredible. An unbelievable word that literally means unbelievable. 

Ready for the incredible.

A long way from talking about the features of the car.

We also walk around, all of us, in a world where we concede that everything we buy, watch, use, vote for and fuck is generic. There is no point of differentiation. Everything is word-flated. Awesome, brilliant and genius. 

Pyramids were awesome. 

Feynman was brilliant.

And Van Gogh was a genius.

Don't apply those words to ads.

Just don't.

I suppose I could get macro on all this and say the economics of holding company math eliminates the time needed to find out details that are interesting. So we ratiocinate, and hire legions of people to be Chief Rationcination Officers, who tell us that people can't read and nothing matters.

I'll go to my own personal crematory not believing that shit. I want to know where things are made, how they're made, what they're made of. The same with people I work with and for. I can't believe I'm the last person who feels this way.

And I can't believe something like the ad below wouldn't work today. There are about 100 words in the ad. Someone's convinced the world that 30 seconds of information is too much to contend with.

For something that probably costs two months of take-home pay.

30-seconds is too much.

Incredible.

Classic ads, 2021-style

 

Thanks to Dave Dye, progenitor of the Stuff from the Loft blog (davedye.com) for his help in making the shitty parodies above and below look better than the real thing.

Coffee with a rising star.

As I do so often, as I am blessed to do so often, I had a Zooffee™, a Zoom + Coffee, with a rising star in the industry. This particular young lady grew up about six blocks from me in Manhattan and was Hebrew school friends with my younger daughter, Hannah. (Call that Six Degrees of Not Eating Bacon.)

I became reacquainted with Sara when she was interning from Miami Ad School at Ogilvy. Shortly thereafter, Sara relocated to San Francisco and is now back in the City. For about the past 15 months or so, she's been a copywriter at Droga5. We've kept in touch in a desultory manner--sharing the occasional note, wave, spot or joke.

I had no expectations from this meeting. Other than I think it's important for us old guys to talk to young people. To hear what they're thinking, what scares them, what they feel they're getting or not getting at wherever they're working. And how they're dealing with all the many issues of building a career in an industry that is beginning to resemble a tapped-out coal seam. It would probably be good for the big machers in the industry to have friendships like these. It might teach them something. Maybe empathy.

However, being New Yorkers, before we talked advertising, we talked about real estate. Living in Manhattan is a little like living on a Monopoly board. You're almost always looking to move to a better property.

Sara was gushing over a great apartment she and her husband bought at Covid panic-prices. Via Zoom I could see the leafy balcony that ran along the entire length of her coop.

I replied that I got a Covid-bargain up here in Connecticut as well. We escaped New York before the rush, found an eddy of a town and put a bid in on waterfront property while half of America was still calling a virus that as of yesterday has killed over 600,000 Americans (more than the number of people who live in Milwaukee or Baltimore) "little more than a cold."

"The guy who sold us the place," I said, "really fucked up. He had crammed twice as much furniture into the house as it could hold, had broken vertical blinds from 1977 on the windows, and it was hot as Hades when we saw the place."

Sara replied, "he didn't stage it."

"That's funny," I said. "And it probably cost him a couple hundred thousand."

The conversation then turned to advertising. Working in a office while never going to an office. And presenting to clients over Zoom.

As I do so often, I made a leap.

"I think most agency creatives do a lousy job 'staging' their work. My wife and I are thinking of building an addition to this house. Before we spend the money, we brought in a realtor--one of those savvy ones who calls a run-down hovel 'cozy.' We wanted her to look at the plans for our addition through a buyer's eyes. 'Is it worth the money,' we asked. In other words, 'will it show well?'"

"Yes," Sara said. "Creatives usually talk about why the work is great from their point of view--that it's cool. That they're using this director, and so on."

"Back when I was at Ogilvy the first time," I replied, "I had written about a dozen spots. Brand spots and direct-response television spots for IBM.

"At the time, the rap against Ogilvy was that we couldn't sell anything. We did nice image spots. But couldn't 'get the phone to ring.' It's not easy on a high-ticket price brand like IBM.

"When I presented, I threw out the meeting agenda. I said to the client, we always present the brand spots first. But you need to sell things. So I'm showing you the 'phone number' spots first."

You could have knocked my client over with a feather. That "staging" showed her I was thinking of her. Her business. Her ass in a sling. Not my reel, reputation or preciousness.

All 12 spots were sold--I'm not exaggerating--before I even read a single script.

I read somewhere that 80 million photos are uploaded on Instagram every day. That's about one-thousand pictures a second. To my eyes, it seems like 700 of that thousand per second are of people's dinner. And the photo is staged--perseverated over. The sprig of whatever is just so. So's the lemon peel in the highball glass. We stage the shit out of stuff all the time.

But when it comes to our own work, we forget. 

Sure we do decks.

But we don't make sure they're short, sharp, funny, memorable. And most important that they're about solving the client's problems. Most clients, I've found, care very little about this director or that director. They want a spot that works--that breaks through and informs.

As an industry we've forgotten that we're "agents." We're not supposed to be in this for our aggrandizement and fame. We're in it to create that for our clients. We're supposed to put their brands in the spotlight. Not ours.

You ought to remember that next time you're showing things to a client:

All the world's a stage.

A message from our Flounder.

 

The future of work?

Me. Second from left.

20,000 years ago or even 10,000 years ago, most hominids were hunters and gatherers. There wasn't a whole helluva lot of agriculture, if there was any at all.

There were, however, a ton of animals for humans to prey on. And fruit. And grubs. Look! There's a handful under that log. 

Hunter-gatherers had a pretty good life--all things considered. Sure, they could die from a scraped knee. But on the other hand, there was plenty of game, and not that many people. Your little area of land could sustain your people. There was little need for anyone to come into your territory or for you to stray into anyone else's. From the perspective of the 20th Century--the bloodiest century in human history, or even the 21st, it was a relatively peaceful time.

What's more, as I said, game was abundant. Most hunter-gatherers only had to "work" between two and four hours a day to feed themselves and their families. That's true with the few remaining hunter-gatherer societies today. 

Along about 9000 years ago, agriculture came into the picture. People began modifying and cultivating grains and domesticating animals. The good news was, they could stay put and build homes. The bad news was that they had to work many more hours to sustain themselves--usually more than 12 hours a day. It's tough to till the soil. Just ask my wife. She's growing cilantro.

Agriculture, for all its work, opened the doors to a lot of things. For one, a community could have a surplus of food. Second, since a few farmers could produce a lot of food, labor became specialized. People could do things other than subsist.

Because people lived now in villages, they needed protection. So some people became royalty--kings and dukes, some became knights, some became artisans. Some removed offal. Some in the lower orders wrote ads. But the most salient point in all this is that people had to work longer and longer for their survival and became more and more interdependent on others for their propagation.

Today--about two of every five articles I see on LinkedIn seems to be about the future of work. Everyone seems to be speculating or postulating on what life will be like assuming the Pandora's Box of worldwide pandemics is nailed shut once again.

So with Covid seemingly in abeyance, we ask what will the office look like? Will we return? Will we work from home? What about those of us who have left the city for places far afield?

On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal ran its annual report on CEO pay and performance. You can, if you subscribe to the WSJ (who have a tough paywall) read the whole thing here.

The distance between CEO pay and the pay of the rest of the world is, not surprisingly, widening. The rich are doing what they do: getting richer.

I don't think you can have a real discussion on the future of work if you don't have a real discussion about disproportionate CEO pay. For instance, John Wren, CEO of Omnicom made just over $11 million last year--just over 262 times what his "median" employee earned. So for every dollar you earn, Mr. Wren made 262 dollars.

Back in the 1960s, if my memory holds, someone at J. Walter Thomson realized that their offices looked like shit. That they were a bit dispiriting because they were drab and beige and decrepit.

To get people to stay in the office longer and work harder, the word was that JWT gave people small budgets to fix up their offices. All of a sudden, cheap plastic furnishings were replaced by mahogany and leather. People felt better about where they worked. They stayed in the office later and worked a little harder. Who knows--employee attrition (which often leads to account attrition) might even have slowed. 

People, for this brief shining moment, were treated with respect. It makes me think of this from Yale professor of architecture Vincent Sculley. He was speaking by in the mid 1960s of the difference between the old Penn Station that was torn down for the new one.

Sculley said, "One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat." I think we can say the same thing about office space and work conditions today.

My point in all this is simple.

All the bushwa about the future of work seems to ignore what would make employees happy--now and in the future. Being treated like individuals. With personal space and effects. And maybe a slim slice of quiet now and again.

Maybe offices that don't look like a still frame from Fritz Lang's Metropolis. How about decent furnishings? A $50 gift card because you're you? An occasional thank you?

How about treating people like people, with a certain nobility--not as they are today, with a faceless interchangeability?

When I started GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, I had some models to learn from. Whatever holding companies did, I would try to do the opposite. 

Not only would I charge a lot, I would pay people working for me a lot and try to treat people fairly. Because I want the best people. I am able to do this because good people produce good work and produce it more quickly and more of it than people who are underpaid, underfed (emotionally) and over-stressed.

I'm 16-months in and I haven't had anyone tell me I'm too expensive. Most clients seem happy. As are the people who work with me. I'm as happy as I can be, being a beaten on Shtetl Jew, unaccustomed to happiness.

Maybe we should think about making people happy and being happy. About treating people well. Rewarding them. Showing care and appreciation.

Maybe that's the future of work.

Sharing isn't caring.

The first high school teacher to take me under her auspices was Mrs. Chapin, who taught 10th-grade English at the leafy private school I was sentenced to. In some ways, Mrs. Chapin saved my life. If that's too dramatic, she taught me that it's our responsibility as humans to take a close look at words and how they are used.

Among other things, Mrs. Chapin introduced me to William Styron, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Flannery O'Connor and a host of other writers. She loaded up my brain and school-locker with dozens of books beyond the curriculum because she knew that reading would make me think and thinking would keep me somewhat out of trouble.

There were others, too, who made me think about words. When Shelley Lazarus was quoted about Steve Hayden one morning in the Wall Street Journal, she said, "He takes complex ideas and reduces them to simple thoughts. He never writes in jargon." Those words became my professional brief--and again reminded me to think about words and their meaning. And of course, I learned from others, too.

Viktor Klemperer in his famous war diaries, "I Will Bear Witness," and "The Language of the Third Reich," emphasized the point. As did Eric Arthur Blair in the essay I refer to more than any other, on how to think and write well, "Politics and the English Language."

The point in language should be to communicate clearly, beautifully and succinctly. But most people--and certainly most corporations--usually use language to deceive, obscure and skirt. They use long words when a short one will do. They use over-used cliches that because they are so common don't get heard, and they use jargon that no one--not even the speaker--knows what it means.

There were probably 10,000 announcements and commercials not long ago about "these unprecedented times." We all stopped listening. Over-use made the words meaningless and, as bad, notice-less.

The first job of communication is getting noticed. If you can think back to just seconds after you emerged from your mother's womb, or from a dirty test-tube, you probably wailed like a dozen police sirens in war-torn Europe. 

You got noticed. That was your job.

If your cry as a baby sounded like white-noise or an in-flight announcement on how to fasten a seatbelt or a pharma-commercial, you would have perished and our species would have died off 4.5 million years ago, or 5,000 if you're a non-science believing republican. Because mom wouldn't have paid attention and babies would die.

Just now I got off the phone with a client and I fucked up. He was late for our call, so I called him. He stammered a bit--nervous. 

"I'm dealing with alternate-side," he said, "and my 11 moved to nine."

"Why don't you just call me when you can," I responded. "I have some things to share with you."

I did it.

I used a cliche. A bad one.

I said I was going to share some things.

Nope.

Sorry.

I don't share with clients. Not that I'm imperious or an ass. 

But 

sharing implies we have an equal stake in creating the work. We don't. It's my work. I don't share it with you. I show it to you. Then I sell it to you.

If it were really sharing, I'd take your input and follow it. This ad is a shared effort after all, and we're in this together.

Only we're not.

I'm here to guide you. Not follow you.

Of course, I'll take suggestions. I'll listen to reason. And everyone from Secretariat on down to Joe DiMaggio misses sometimes, and I certainly am no better.

But we're not sharing.

60 years ago Bill Bernbach wrote this sentence for Robert Townsend, then the CEO of Avis.

"You will approve, disapprove but not try to improve. If you do that, you'll have everyone in the agency fighting to work on your business."

GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware company has grown quite a bit in the year since I was freed to open my own place and make real money. 

I try to follow Bernbach's guidance as often as any human can. BTW, the mentors you choose don't have to be alive. As Yogi Berra said, "you can observe a lot by watching." And you can learn a lot by thinking, listening and writing.

That's what I've learned so far.

Thanks Mrs. Chapin. Viktor Klemperer. And George Orwell.

Thanks for sharing.

-

BTW, if you want to watch a 1950 Oscar-winner about being noticed (at least as a Language Does Not Lie antidote) here it is. If nothing else, it might hand you a smile. And who couldn't use a smile?