Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Writing Boots Quote of the Week

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Came across this on my weekly rounds for the Executive Communication Report (the free Friday ezine to which all self-respecting communicators subscribe):

"When I want my men to remember something important, to really make it stick, I give it to them double dirty. It may not sound nice to some bunch of little old ladies at an afternoon tea party, but it helps my soldiers to remember. You can't run an army without profanity; and it has to be eloquent profanity. An army without profanity couldn't fight its way out of a piss-soaked paper bag." —General George. S. Patton

The danger of the misreverence that social media breeds

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For several years after I broke into this business, I was afraid to call Roger D'Aprix on the phone, because he was a living legend of employee communication. A lot of the practitioners I was interviewing told me he actually taught them how to think about their job.

Finally I called him and we talked and he didn't bite; he gave me a genial interview. Maybe I had been silly to wait so long. But probably, too, the waiting had prepared me to interview D'Aprix more carefully and intelligently.

Eventually, D'Aprix honored me by writing a chapter in a book I edited, and a regular column for the Journal of Employee Communication Management, which I'd founded for Ragan. Now, he serves as the senior judge on the E2E Communication Awards, which I chair.

And over the years, we actually became friends—me as a stander upon his shoulders, he (I think) an occasional admirer of my writing. And, even better, we liked each other, reveling in the occasional chance for a drink or lunch, and exchanging occasional e-mails that were always friendly and trusting and warm.

And then I check my Facebook page and I see this, on the right-hand column.

Roger D'Aprix

Help him find his friends.

Suggest friends for him.

Why is Roger D'Aprix on Facebook? Surely, because he wants to remain relevant. But I don't want to see him on there, because I want to remain reverent.

I see all the democratizing upside of Facebook and other social media. We're each our own carnival barker now. But how will we organize a profession—or a society—without reverence, and reverence's conjoined twin, irreverence?

That ‘dialogue on race’? Better start it young

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"I
was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people could
accept. I was their daydream. I had the worst kind of
acceptance because it was never for how great I was or what I
contributed. It was because of the way I looked." —Lena Horne

***

One evening last week I took Scout to the playground so she could climb on the monkey bars while I shot hoops. (What's worse: that, or pushing her on the swing while reading Harper's? What can I say? Playgrounds are dull.)

As I'm shooting around by myself, a gaggle of little kids runs up and asks if they can play too.

"All right," I bellow, pretending I'm the hero of some cool urban movie whose plot will reveal itself soon. "Everyone against me!"

I don't block their shots and take impossible shots myself, so the score is close. But they're all ball hogs and pretty soon they're fighting amongst themselves.

A light-skinned African-American kid turns to a dark-skinned African-American kid and says, "Pass the ball … Black."

The kid looks wounded.

I stop the game and ask them their ages.

"Eight," they say at the same time.

"Then show a better example for these younger boys," I say sternly, pointing to a four- and five year-old who are playing with us.

They take me seriously, to my surprise, and the rest of the game goes smoothly.

Later, I tell this story to my wife, who teaches in an elementary school in an all-black neighborhood on the West Side. She shrugs, like a paramedic you're trying to impress with a story about a heart attack.