My language-sensitive friend Suzanne Ecklund e-mailed me the other day, hoping e-loud that I would share her consternation at the reluctance of the "under-40 crowd" to say, "You're welcome."

Instead, it's "no problem."

I have feelings about this, but they're not as much outrage as perplexed sadness.

I think this discomfort with the traditional thank you/you're welcome transaction betrays confusion about who we are, what we deserve to get from one another and what we are responsible to give.

In the dark about all of that, and thus afraid to owe or to be owed, we try to turn every interaction into a neutral trade. Every transaction is a "win-win," every teacher learns just as much from the students, and every kindness wasn't a kindness at all. It was, instead, "no problem." (Or, as a sweet-voiced Australian hotelier once said in words poetic to these ears of mine, "Not a worry, mistah Murray.")

I'd like to declare myself above this syndrome, but hell, I haven't been 40 for long and just today I ran a piece of equipment across town for someone who needed it. When he thanked me I said, "Oh, no worries. It was actually a nice motorcycle ride over here."

That was true.

But it was also true that he had apologetically asked a favor and had thanked me for doing it, and it was my social duty to say, before "no worries" and the gracious motorcycle anecdote, "You're welcome."

Why are we afraid of such modest intimacy? And why are the younger of us more afraid than the older?

The last line of yesterday's Twitter poem was a complaint that the association's "social media creds" were tarnished because "Angela Sinickas prohibits tweating during her session."

After I stopped chearing, I e-mailed Angela to get the background. She came back:

If there was a civil rights movement just for speakers that fought to make it illegal to tweet during sessions, I would march in it.

The speaker has learned about the audience, prepared and rehearsed a lecture, traveled to the event and summoned the fortitude to stand before his or her colleagues and present his or her ideas for evaluation.

Do we or do we not owe it to the speaker to sit still for the course of the talk and take the speech in in all its context before sending our glib little 140-character evaluations and raccoon insights out into the world?

I think civilized people will agree that we do. As for the rest of you: Tweet this.

The International Association of Business Communicators is holding its annual International Conference this week, and I'm sorry not to be there to this year to cheer, jeer, leer, loathe and fear.

But an hour spent gaping at the conference Twitter stream felt so amazingly like being there that I was inspired to turn some key tweets into a poem, to take you there with me.