Donald Trump keeps bragging that he “aced” the cognitive test. I don’t believe him, and here’s why. The world’s Gold Standard test is the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, and as someone who lives not far from Montreal, I know that I would ace the test, but Trump wouldn’t have a clue. Here are the questions, see…
In the first of my three careers I was a teacher, and for the last eight years of that I taught middle school in a rural community. My classes always had a fair number of farm boys who, to put it kindly, were not committed academics. Lovable, boisterous, sweaty, and rowdy, but never much concerned…
In use since at least the Dirty Thirties, the expression “a day late and a dollar short” is weightier than some of its relatives such as “that ship has sailed” or “closing the door after the horse has left the barn”. “A day late and a dollar short” tells us that not only did we…
Funniest thing about language is that we all know what a word means even if its derivation makes no sense. Take the lovely canary, for instance. Canaries are so named because they were first found on the islands of the same name, and most of us have always assumed that the Canary Islands were so…
I’m not even going to start on explaining how our language came to include the expression “Charley Horse” to describe a painful leg cramp, except to say that apparently it first came into use amongst baseball players in the 1880s. It used to be that voting involved dropping white or black marbles or beans into…
There isn’t a chance that you can get your calendar under control. To begin with, the calendar itself, even without your touching it, is a mess. Take November, for example, the eleventh month, whose name derives from the Latin novem, meaning “ninth”. In the same vein, September, October, and December respectively derive from septem, octo,…
Self-deprecating humor is a wonderful piece in the toolkit of any communicator. It can oil the gears in networking and win over an audience for the platform speaker. In general, it’s a powerful device for engagement. But yet. Self-deprecating humor, like any other tool, can cause more harm than good and should always be used…
Jonathan Liew, in the Guardian, January 9, 2023 wrote of the freshly retired Welsh football phenomenon Gareth Bale. Here’s part of what he said. Of course Bale always played to win. But in the 30-yard screamers and lightning bursts of speed, you can spot something else there too: a young man playing for the sake…
When I was growing up, Normand Trinder Bowley was my hero. He knew everything about everything, he was kind and generous, and it seemed every tradesperson in the community sought him out in his retirement because he could solve problems that had them baffled. And he was my grandfather. Except he wasn’t. I remember like…
I’m going for my PhD, and so should you. Soon enough, all of us can be Dr. Whosit. Let me explain. Back in the days of my first career, teaching school, we flunked kids. Fairly regularly. I was often the lucky guy to get a class full of latter-day scholars who needed a second run…