by Carolyn Howard-Johnson  •  Jan. 30, 2012 (originally reviewed for MyShelf.com)

If you don’t love language, it’s a good bet you aren’t a writer. But if you’re a writer, reading more about language (linguistics (?)) may not be high on your list of priorities. It’s so integral to the way you think, you believe you don’t need it.

I believe that Euphemania by Ralph Keyes will change your mind. Written with humor (because euphemisms are just naturally funny?) this book will certainly entertain. If you’ve ever wondered about the intricacies of our euphemisms—the origins as an example—this is the book for you. But who would have guessed that it also might be the perfect book to hone the skills of writers of dialogue and humor?

Academic writers?Use it as a quick-study on how to write a book that will sell to a wide market. The secret?Voice. Humor. Colloquialisms. Yep, and euphemisms. A book does not have to have the lack of moisture content (dry!) of a text book to be a textbook.I know about academic expectations. My daughter is a Ph.D. candidate. She explains it to me all the time. Having said that, if you’d like to actually sell something rather than giving everything away to unappreciative academic journals, try rewriting your brilliant theory for the general public!

Anthropologists and linguists will love this book, too. But mostly, it’s just fun learning why we use asterisks for words like sh*t and the euphemisms like the f-word. It’s also tons of fun to identify phrases we’ve stopped thinking of as euphemisms (love handles, anyone?), just because they are so part of our everyday language.

If I were rating this book for an Amazon review, it would give it a true (not a fake) five-star rating. For usefulness. For fun. For the love of language.

by Mark H. Teeter at 17/10/2011

At the end of the movie Gone with the Wind, Rhett Butler leaves his mercurial wife Scarlett with perhaps the most memorable line in the history of cinema. To the entreaties “Where shall I go? What shall I do?”, the dashing Captain Butler simply replies, “Frankly, my dear, my indifference is boundless.”

What, that’s not the way you remember it? How about “Frankly, my dear, it is of no consequence”? Or “It’s all the same to me”? Or “I don’t give a hoot”? All of these euphemisms were suggested by the MGM studio to get around the proscribed word “damn,” whose use had disturbed the Hollywood censors of 1939 to the point of threatening the film’s release.

Happily, the Production Code monitors eventually relented and Butler’s “damn” entered movie history – and rightly so, as the word bears just the level of severity and finality needed to make the line work. “Boundless indifference”? – are you kidding?

This hoot of a story is one of hundreds offered up by Ralph Keyes in “Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms” (New York: Little Brown, 2010). Russians learning English would do well to spend some time with this volume, as euphemisms are an important part of the language – and one of the most difficult to keep track of, damn it.

Everybody does it

Deriving from the ancient Greek for “good speaking,” euphemism today represents the substitution of a “mild, indirect, or vague expression for one thought to be offensive, harsh, or blunt” – or simply “makes us uneasy,” as Keyes sums it up. The oldest recorded euphemism reflects this unease: the word “bear” appeared so that medieval Europeans could talk about the creature without naming it – which might summon the “bear” itself!

Every modern language keeps a stable of euphemisms. Russians are no slouches, ranging from the simple pancake блин (blin) – used to replace obscenities beginning with the same initial letters, just as Anglophones use “fudge” and “shucks” – and extending to the more chilling practice of re-labeling mass imprisonment and murder as “repressions” and “purges.” English gave the world “concentration camp,” of course, and may have become the global euphemizing leader over recent decades as it has split into more than a dozen nationand culture-specific Englishes that create euphemisms all their own.

In other words

“Euphemania” cites a large number of the euphemisms in broad use today in the United States, where an obsession with euphemizing has long been noted by visitors. The tendency derives, goes one theory, from the novelty of American democracy itself.

Whatever the reason, this tendency toward “more polite” or “politically correct” substitution has long posed problems for acquirers of US English, as “which words needed to be avoided and which ones were appropriate wasn’t always clear” – and isn’t now. Just as a 19th century English aristocrat could be chastised, to his astonishment, for saying “leg” instead of “limb” in the presence of American women, so a visitor today may be bewildered to find that non-white Americans should emphatically not be referred to as “colored people” – yet “people of color” works just fine, thanks.

The rapidity with which euphemisms change in the US lexicon suggests a “carousel whirl in which words are both soiled and cleansed”: some go mainstream – as Butler’s “damn” has – while others, termed “fallen euphemisms,” become as scandalous as the words they replace. Of the latter, a surprising example (to Prof. Extreme anyway) was “fart,” formerly a medical euphemism which “over time took on the odor of the act it referred to and itself became offensive.” One acceptable alternative – “to break wind” – should not be confused with the light outdoor jacket commonly called a “windbreaker.”

Don’t panic

The sheer volume and maze-like evolution of English euphemisms may seem daunting – and for good reason – but recall two things: first, Anglophones are aware of their euph-obsession and will normally make allowances for the non-native speaker who inadvertently lets out a “fart” in the wrong linguistic company.

And secondly, native speakers themselves are caught often enough using the wrong euphemism – or, even worse, creating a new one. When North Carolina governor Mark Sanford initially tried to disguise a prolonged absence spent visiting his mistress in Argentina as “hiking the Appalachian Trail,” his political career was over. And the country suddenly had a new generation of “hikers”!

A century ago, composer Max Reger wrote a critic after a very negative review, “I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it will be behind me.” There is room, in other words, for considerable wit in this substitution game – and surely that’s reason enough for native speakers and English learners alike, when contemplating their choice of euphemisms, to give a damn.

Extreme Extra Credit: Last time: The advice that “short words are the best, and the old words best of all” was offered by Nobel literature laureate Winston Churchill – congrats to Dasha Loseva of Moscow for the first correct ID. Today: When an American party guest asks a host, “Where is your euphemism?” – what is the real question?

Mark H. Teeter is an American English teacher and translator

Euphemania: Our Love Affair With Euphemisms
by Ralph Keyes

“I prefer not to say we are killing other people,” an American artillery captain said during the Gulf War. ‘I prefer to say we are ‘servicing the target.’”

Ah yes, servicing the target. Once you’ve read Ralph Keyes’—at first kind of cutesy, then rapidly increasing in intensity—little book on euphemisms, you might think servicing the target could range in meaning from dropping some big dogs to playing hide the poker to something more blunt, say, taking revenge on a co-worker or terrible boss in some unmentionable way.

Speaking of unmentionables, that’s the whole point of his book Euphemania. What we can’t mention, like bodily functions, er, I mean urinating and defecating, or rather peeing and pooping, or certain other bodily functions like, say, sex—or politically problematic unmentionables, like killing, or maybe even murdering, hundreds of civilians in a bloody and unclear war—that’s what Keyes writes about in this piece that surveys the euphemistic ground and ends up with the theory that humans might desperately need euphemisms in order to converse.

After all, where’s the joy in marking insider/outsider status if, say, a sixth-grade girl can’t say to her female friends that “Cousin Freddie’s here for a visit again” without having the boys in her class suddenly squealing “Period panties!” and running away. (A boy in my seventh grade class who would humiliate the girls by coming up to us, sniffing hard and then declaring, “I can smell who’s on the rag!” May he rot in h-e-double-hockey-sticks.)
Keyes’ compilation sometimes feels just like that—a list of euphemisms. But he weaves a narrative through the book, which starts with what our ancestors considered unmentionable: The name(s) of God(s) or other powerful spirits (Yahweh, “the kindly ones,” “He Who Must Not Be Named”). He talks about food and drink (“Rocky Mountain oysters”); death (“a fatal event”); body parts (“the king’s highway”—which euphemism for vagina, I must say, gives me an entirely different view of the book Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell); work and the economy (the best euphemism for being laid off is not in this book, but in Jonathan Ferris’ Then We Came to the End: “Tom was walked Spanish down the hall”); hunting (“population management”); and much more.

He speaks of class and its ramifications on euphemizing—there’s a particularly fun section on the lords of King Charles II’s court and their extremely raunchy poetry—and of the ways that euphemisms (say, about how well stocks might perform, or about the possibility that someone with no job or income should ever be given a mortgage) affect the way we all live.

In short, the book makes for pleasant reading. It’s not too deep; it’s often funny and sometimes infuriating (“To the Pentagon, soldiers who were KIA became combat ineffective”—it’s like reading The Forever War, except it’s real); and it’s always enjoyable if never too intellectually challenging. Is it a great “bathroom read”? I’d answer in the affirmative.

Ralph Keyes will be speaking at the Eugene Public Library for Banned Books Week, September 25, 2011, at 2:00 p.m.

The shady art of the euphemism has been used to veil body parts and deceive investors

By Diane Dietz

The Register-Guard

Published: Monday, Sep 26, 201

When the stock market takes a tumble, as it does on a regular basis these days, the experts on Wall Street call it a “correction.”

The word sounds as benign as what a second-grade teacher does to a student’s homework, said Ralph Keyes, author of “Euphemania: Our Love Affair With Euphemisms.”

The term “market correction” doesn’t hint that millions have lost money that they expected to see them through retirement — most especially in fall 2008, when the market lost 18 percent of its value in a single week.

“Collapsing,” Keyes said. “The market is not correcting; it’s collapsing.”

But euphemisms such as “market correction” are what people use in the place of scarier words, Keyes said Sunday in a speech at the Eugene Public Library held in honor of Banned Book Week.

“Think of them as comfort words,” he said. “We use these euphemisms in place of terms that make us uneasy.

“What makes us uneasy changes with time.”

The euphemisms of any era will indicate what people of that time were most concerned about, he said. In the past, euphemisms for body parts and body functions were rife.

Winston Churchill was at a dinner party in Virginia, for example, where the hostess asked what part of the chicken he would care to eat.

Churchill asked for some “breast,” Keyes recounted.

A woman sitting next to him reprimanded the British prime minister for using such an offensive term, saying that what he should have asked for was “white meat.”

“The next day Churchill sent this woman a corsage with the message: ‘Pin this on your white meat,’” Keyes said.

In the days of ancient Rome, the word for the male sex organ was so shocking that citizens used the euphemism “penis,” a word from Latin that meant “small tail,” according to Keyes’ book.

In the centuries since, penis became the risque word that inspired a whole lexicon of euphemisms.

But as the world changes, so do the euphemisms. Today, economics has spawned a fresh run of euphemisms.

Nobody has problems anymore — they have “issues,” Keyes said.

“Toward the end of his term in office, George W. Bush said the economy was having some issues. Boy, did it ever,” Keyes said.

At its start, pundits referred to the recession as a “softening,” he said.

“When the stock market began to plummet, it was called an ‘eq­uity retreat,’ ” he said.

Financiers used the word “subprime” to describe a bad loan.

The worldwide financial problems were caused in part by people who borrowed against their homes or took out second mortgages.

That sounds bad, Keyes said, so bankers called it “accessing home equity” or putting your “assets to work.”

“It sounds like discovering diamonds in your backyard, and was treated this way by millions of homeowners and bankers offering loans to help them ‘leverage their assets,’ ” he said.

“When these loans were sliced up like so much salami and bundled into ‘collateralized debt obligations,’ they were said to be ‘securitized.’

“This has a reassuring sound. Something that’s securitized is secure, right? Wrong.”

Keyes said it’s not a stretch to suggest that euphemistic language helped the financial shenanigans of recent years to go on undetected.

“Tortured, euphemistic prose doesn’t just conceal problems,” he said. “It promotes the sort of muddled, evasive thinking that led to those problems in the first place.”

Community leaders will read out loud from banned books in an annual celebration of freedom of speech. Springfield Mayor Christine Lundberg is expected to turn the first page.

When and where: 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, Springfield Public Library, 225 Fifth St.

The Register-Guard, Eugene, Oregon, USA

Friday, July 22, 2011

I love quotations in general. I collect musings of the great minds like some people collect stamps. My notebooks are full of scrawled quotations and attributions. The short, pithy encapsulation of a truth impresses me greatly. After all, William Shakespeare said, “Brevity is the soul of wit.”

My admiration comes from envy. A talent for pithiness truly impresses me because I have to struggle with it. As a writer, I have a weakness for wordiness and must edit constantly. No matter how many useless words I cut, I never feel I’ve achieved the tightest writing. Therefore, I admire a writer who can say what he means in short, memorable phrases.

However, I’ve noticed over the years that many famous sayings are not quite what they seem. Sometimes the quotation that is familiar to us is not exactly what the person said. Even worse, sometimes the person to whom the quotation is attributed often is not the person who originally said it.

A famous example of this trait is “Truth is stranger than fiction.” I heard it repeated for years without knowing who said it. No one ever is given credit for this line; it has assumed the authority of a proverb. In fact, it comes from the poet Lord Byron, who wrote, “for truth is always strange; / Stranger than fiction: if it could be told.” Not quite the familiar quotation.

Many sources of quotations err when they attribute a saying — not only the Internet, but trusted reference books as well. I’ve often been frustrated trying to track down a quotation and its source. Luckily, the proper tool has arrived: “The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When,” by Ralph Keyes. This excellent book now graces the go-to shelf on my desk — the reference books that are essential aids to writing. The book has the added virtue of being delightfully, gracefully and deftly written, making it a pleasure to read — a rarity for a reference book.

In the introduction to his book, Keyes explains the process by which quotations like Byron’s original become familiar adages. He calls the process “bumper-sticking” and explains, “Quotations that start out too long, too clumsy and too inharmonious end up shorter, more graceful and more melodious in the retelling.” That’s certainly true in Byron’s case.

Keyes also points out “flypaper figures” — famous people who are often attributed with lines that are not their own.

Most often, the quotation comes from a lesser-known figure. The most famous example is President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s most quoted line: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” According to Keyes, this line has a long history, and Roosevelt seems to have drawn his version of the quote from Henry David Thoreau, who said, “Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.”

However, a version of the quotation originated with Michel Montaigne, the 16th-century French essayist: “The thing of which I have most fear is fear.” Francis Bacon, an English near-contemporary of Montaigne’s, wrote, “Nothing is terrible except fear itself.” The final “verdict” of Keyes on this quotation is “Credit the thought to Montaigne, its improvement to Bacon and the final version to FDR, with help from Thoreau.”

Keyes notes several flypaper figures, including Shakespeare, Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King Jr. Twain is particularly sticky when it comes to quotes; almost any funny remark from the 19th century is attributed to him. Similarly, George Carlin is becoming the humorous flypaper figure of the 20th century, with all kinds of jokes he never told attributed to him.

One of Keyes’ flypaper figures is Dorothy Parker, the early 20th-century American writer, who always has been a favorite of mine. Her sarcastic and acerbic witticisms are legendary.

One famous “Parkerism,” which Keyes confirms she actually said, is a play on the Shakespeare line quoted above. While captioning an “underwear layout” in Vogue magazine, she expressed the idea that the season’s lingerie was skimpier than usual. Although her original line is longer, I prefer the bumper-stickered version: “Brevity is the soul of lingerie.” Much wittier.

Keyes writes that Parker’s tendency to be misattributed started during her life, with the playwright George S. Kaufman complaining that “Everything I’ve ever said is attributed to Dorothy Parker.” To her credit, Parker “herself disavowed authorship of most of the witticisms that were routinely put in her mouth.”

Truth be told, I’ve misquoted famous figures all my life without knowing it. The value of Keyes’ book is that it shows the great extent of misquotations and misattributions. I’m now very suspicious of any quote I hear.

This problem might not be a problem, though. After all, Aristotle said, “History is what happened; literature is what should have happened.” By extension, history is what was said, and literature is what should have been said.

Come to think of it, I wrote that quote down from a lecture many years ago and never have actually seen it in anything I’ve read by Aristotle. Hmmm.

Doesn’t matter. It’s great literature.

As Ralph Keyes notes in his book Euphemania, “Euphemisms can have a bright side and a dark side.” They can be a source of evasion, a way to avoid topics that should be confronted, a way of choosing not to face unpleasant truths. At worst, euphemisms are employed by politicians, bureaucrats, merchants, and others as tools of manipulation. Ronald Reagan, for example, renamed the multiwarhead MX missile, capable of destroying multiple major cities and killing tens, or even hundreds, of millions of civilians – Peacekeeper.

When used judiciously, however, euphemisms can civilize discourse and be a welcome source of courtesy in rough times. At their best they can be creative verbal fresheners that make it easier to discuss touchy subjects. In his book Nigger Dick Gregory uses a taboo word to make us focus on its wide and often thoughtless use in our society. Playwright Eve Ensler does much the same thing in Vagina Monologues.

In Euphemania, Keyes traces the evolution of euphemisms about sex, excretions, disease, food, and many other subjects in great detail. The story of how – and why – these changes have occurred is interesting in itself, as well as being a tribute to his scholarship.

The word “bear“ is an interesting example. It‘s the oldest known euphemism, first recorded a thousand years ago, that means “the brown one.” Bears are so terrifying that early northern Europeans referred to them by substitute names, for fear that uttering their real name might beckon these ferocious beasts. Instead, the animals were referred to as “the honey eater” or “the licker.”

This tactic of not calling something terrible by its actual name, lest this bring it forth, was used often. In one of his novels, Stendhal depicts a mother who refuses to call her tubercular son’s illness by its actual name for fear that doing so might hasten his death. Tuberculosis was, of course, the major fatal disease of the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth. .

Similarly, Emily Dickenson’s biographer concluded that the poet was a closet epileptic, who could only refer to that affliction obliquely. During Dickenson’s mid-nineteenth century era epilepsy was considered shameful for men to have and unmentionable, literally, for women.

More recently cancer has been treated in the same way, as I know from my own experience. My mother always whispered the word, as if saying it out loud would bring on the affliction.

Keyes, always aware of the political and ethnic implications of euphemisms, illustrates also describes the many diseases named after ethnic groups. Thus English speakers called syphilis “Spanish pox.” After French soldiers who besieged Naples in the fifteenth century brought the disease back to France it became known as the Neapolitan disease. Italians preferred French malady, Poles called it German disease, Russians opted for Polish disease, Turks termed it Christian disease. The Japanese called syphilis Portuguese disease while the Portuguese called it Castilian disease. The English, Dutch, Greek, Arabs, and “Hebrews” came in for similar treatment in other contests. With this background it’s little wonder that European history is often a tale of war after war.

The marketplace is a rich, if often misleading, source of euphemisms, some rather dated, some quite new. In the dated but amusing category, Lifebuoy Health Soap had warned consumers about the dangers of body odor, or BO. The presence of BO in thirteen key areas of the body stood between them and social success. Eradicating BO with Lifebuoy “can help you win friends wherever you go” read one ad. The soap’s advertising campaign goes on to describe relationships saved, leading to eventual marriage. One ad even describes a crash with a truck that had been avoided; Lifebuoy playing an important role in preventing this tragedy.

Language manipulation is rampant in the marketplace. For example the word “used,” as in used merchandise, was itself a euphemism for secondhand.. Now it’s been replaced by pre-owned or, better yet, vintage. In a similar vein one airline installed stationary seats on its airplanes and called them pre-reclined. What once were called “junk stores” became thrift shops, then resale stores. And a leading purveyor of coffee calls its smallest cup “tall.”

The government sometimes colludes in this misleading gibberish. With the approval of the US Department of Agriculture, a certain amount of Mechanically Separated Meat –  a slurry of marginal meat such as tendons, bone marrow, and a permitted amount of bone bits, can be included in hot dogs.

Today a new group of terms, or in some cases old ones with new scope, affect our thinking. Among them are national security, climate change, urban, perhaps class (middle, working, and otherwise). These terms illustrate the stress that Keyes puts on the need for care in using words.

from STD and Herpes Pain Relief, Natural, Holistic and OTC Information

June 27, 2011

June 16, 2011

Reviewed: Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms, by Ralph Keyes. New York. Little, Brown and Company, 2010.

As Ralph Keyes notes in his book Euphemania, “Euphemisms can have a bright side and a dark side.” They can be a source of evasion, a way to avoid topics that should be confronted, a way of choosing not to face unpleasant truths. At worst, euphemisms are employed by politicians, bureaucrats, merchants, and others as tools of manipulation. Ronald Reagan, for example, renamed the multiwarhead MX missile, capable of destroying multiple major cities and killing tens, or even hundreds, of millions of civilians – Peacekeeper.

When used judiciously, however, euphemisms can civilize discourse and be a welcome source of courtesy in rough times. At their best they can be creative verbal fresheners that make it easier to discuss touchy subjects. In his book Nigger Dick Gregory uses a taboo word to make us focus on its wide and often thoughtless use in our society. Playwright Eve Ensler does much the same thing in Vagina Monologues.

In Euphemania, Keyes traces the evolution of euphemisms about sex, excretions, disease, food, and many other subjects in great detail. The story of how – and why – these changes have occurred is interesting in itself, as well as being a tribute to his scholarship.

The word “bear“ is an interesting example. It‘s the oldest known euphemism, first recorded a thousand years ago, that means “the brown one.” Bears are so terrifying that early northern Europeans referred to them by substitute names, for fear that uttering their real name might beckon these ferocious beasts. Instead, the animals were referred to as “the honey eater” or “the licker.”

This tactic of not calling something terrible by its actual name, lest this bring it forth, was used often. In one of his novels, Stendhal depicts a mother who refuses to call her tubercular son’s illness by its actual name for fear that doing so might hasten his death. Tuberculosis was, of course, the major fatal disease of the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth. .

Similarly, Emily Dickenson’s biographer concluded that the poet was a closet epileptic, who could only refer to that affliction obliquely. During Dickenson’s mid-nineteenth century era epilepsy was considered shameful for men to have and unmentionable, literally, for women.

More recently cancer has been treated in the same way, as I know from my own experience. My mother always whispered the word, as if saying it out loud would bring on the affliction.

Keyes, always aware of the political and ethnic implications of euphemisms, illustrates also describes the many diseases named after ethnic groups. Thus English speakers called syphilis “Spanish pox.” After French soldiers who besieged Naples in the fifteenth century brought the disease back to France it became known as the Neapolitan disease. Italians preferred French malady, Poles called it German disease, Russians opted for Polish disease, Turks termed it Christian disease. The Japanese called syphilis Portuguese disease while the Portuguese called it Castilian disease. The English, Dutch, Greek, Arabs, and “Hebrews” came in for similar treatment in other contests. With this background it’s little wonder that European history is often a tale of war after war.

The marketplace is a rich, if often misleading, source of euphemisms, some rather dated, some quite new. In the dated but amusing category, Lifebuoy Health Soap had warned consumers about the dangers of body odor, or BO. The presence of BO in thirteen key areas of the body stood between them and social success. Eradicating BO with Lifebuoy “can help you win friends wherever you go” read one ad. The soap’s advertising campaign goes on to describe relationships saved, leading to eventual marriage. One ad even describes a crash with a truck that had been avoided; Lifebuoy playing an important role in preventing this tragedy.

Language manipulation is rampant in the marketplace. For example the word “used,” as in used merchandise, was itself a euphemism for secondhand.. Now it’s been replaced by pre-owned or, better yet, vintage. In a similar vein one airline installed stationary seats on its airplanes and called them pre-reclined. What once were called “junk stores” became thrift shops, then resale stores. And a leading purveyor of coffee calls its smallest cup “tall.”

The government sometimes colludes in this misleading gibberish. With the approval of the US Department of Agriculture, a certain amount of Mechanically Separated Meat –  a slurry of marginal meat such as tendons, bone marrow, and a permitted amount of bone bits, can be included in hot dogs.

Today a new group of terms, or in some cases old ones with new scope, affect our thinking. Among them are national security, climate change, urban, perhaps class (middle, working, and otherwise). These terms illustrate the stress that Keyes puts on the need for care in using words.

Reviewed by: Al Huebner

June 16th, 2011

Ralph Keyes’ Euphemania: Our Love Affair With Euphemisms (Little, Brown and Co., 2010) will delight anyone who loves words, their origins and the way that they reflect cultural intentions, subterfuges and biases. Keyes defines euphemisms as words or phrases substituted for ones that make us uneasy: sexual activity, body parts and secretions, war and killing, money, physical and mental disabilities, even food (Rocky Mountain oysters, anyone?). And, of course, politicians employ them. Nevada’s own Senate Taxation Committee has now morphed into a Revenue Committee. Enjoy!

Selected by Jeanne Goodrich, executive director for the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District.

By Ralph Keyes (Little, Brown and Co., 279 pages, $24.99)

Ever ponder what makes a nacho chip “authentic” or “restaurant-style”? Or why it’s a “courtesy call” when the credit-card company tries to push something over the phone? Ralph Keyes explores such obfuscation when it comes to food, drunkenness, medicine, the military, money, sex, death and body parts. Heck, he even wonders why his first name became a slang stand-in verb for vomit. Keyes delves into the psychology and evolution of language-twisting, too, and points out that a polite paraphrase for one era is taboo for the next.

It’s perfect reading for marketing students, aspiring politicians and anyone wanting exhaustive and giggle-inducing lists (and origins) of alternate expressions for visiting the powder room or breaking wind.

The snicker factor aside, “Euphemania” is a fascinating and amazingly well researched little book. Serious word geeks shouldn’t pass it by.

HOLLY COLLIER WILLMARTH

COPY EDITOR

The impulse to find more refined ways to talking about unpleasant truths is a constant of the human experience; what changes over time are the topics deemed to need sugarcoating.

By Ruth Walker / April 19, 2011

When two different colleagues suggest I should pay attention to a book, I tend to take notice. The book in question is “Euphemania: Our Love Affair With Euphemisms,” by Ralph Keyes.

It is a lighthearted, easy read, but not without erudition.

Sex, disease, death, and body parts all loom large here – quelle surprise. But Keyes puts it all into a larger context. He quotes University of Chicago linguist Joseph Williams: “Euphemism is such a pervasive human phenomenon, so deeply woven into virtually every known culture, that one is tempted to claim that every human has been pre-programmed to find ways to talk about tabooed subjects.”

For prehistoric peoples who believed that to mention directly something they feared would tend to bring it forth, it made sense to refer to bears as “honey-eaters,” Keyes notes.

He goes into current brain research to explain, “Evidence … suggests that cursing may be a form of protolanguage that has more in common with a dog’s bark than, say, Plato’s Republic.” On the other hand, he says, “Evasive speech apparently originates in the newer parts of our brain where complex thought originates. While words that we utter spontaneously when provoked are more likely to emerge from the uncensored limbic brain, given an opportunity to ruminate we turn to the cortex and choose from among its vast supply of euphemisms. Since the brain and a capacity to speak have evolved jointly, it may even be that creating euphemisms contributed to our ability to think.”

It all makes me feel somewhat better about what Keyes calls “the euphemizing instinct.”

Euphemism comes from Greek words meaning “to speak with fair words, use words of good omen,” according to the Online Etymology Dictionary.

Eupheme was the name of “the ancient Greek female spirit of words of good omen, praise, acclaims, shouts of triumph, and applause,” according to Wikipedia.

“The words we use and those we avoid illustrate what we care about most deeply. Euphemisms are the press secretary of values,” Keyes says.

It’s in the realm of public policy that euphemism makes the most trouble today, Keyes suggests. And here it may be useful to distinguish between instinctive euphemism and strategic euphemism. “Global warming” has been knocked out of the box by “climate change,” for instance – a strategic euphemism that’s won bipartisan support.

Not long ago the financial sector was nearly brought down by its involvement in loans known as “subprime.” This ought to mean simply “below first rate.” But it really meant way below first rate, and a lot of people getting first-rate salaries should have been paying enough attention to stop it.

And speaking of the corporate sector, Keyes says, “The tortured prose in annual reports both conceals problems and promotes the muddled thinking that created those problems in the first place. By contrast, direct speech reflects clear thinking. The Ford Motor Company – whose then-CEO wrote in a 2002 annual report that the previous year’s results were ‘unacceptable’ – weathered the subsequent auto industry collapse far better than its mealymouthed competitors.”

It may be that euphemism is most helpful when it gets us talking about difficult subjects. But there comes a time when clear thinking and direct action are needed.

It took me longer to finish this book than the others.  Probably because it’s a nonfiction book that talks about euphemisms.  Since it wasn’t a story with a plot, I didn’t read it as consistently.

So, here is my first nonfiction read of the year…Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms by Ralph Keyes.

From the book flap:

Have you ever wondered why we use so many euphemisms?  In an age when liars  misspeak, couples engage in coital activity, and doctors say painful procedures “might pinch a little,” euphemistic talk abounds.  Did you ever inhale?  Enjoy a wee drop?  Hike the Appalachian Trail?

These are just some of the euphemisms Ralph Keyes writes about in Euphemania.  He shows in fascinating detail how our passion for tidying up language has evolved over time.  How yesterday’s “cow patty” became today’s biosolid, and our ancestors’ “smallest room” was replaced by today’s powder room.  With intriguing stories Keyes reveals why Louisa May Alcott’s family felt compelled to change their name from “Alcocke,” and how “Patagonian toothfish” became Chilean sea bass.

According to Keyes, euphemisms provide an accurate barometer of what makes us uneasy.  Was that talk of God?  Better we should say gad.  Did discussing breasts make us queasy? Try bosoms.   Our prudish Victorian forebears called trousers inexpressibles and toilet paprt curl paper.  To them a vulgar sneeze was a chaste nose spasm, and pregnancy an interesting condition.  We have other concerns.  Bad loans, for example, sound dire; nonperforming assets, not so much.  And why fire an employee who can just as easily be dehired.

Engaging, thoughtful, and brilliantly funny, Euphemania in a rollicking exploration of the surprising and inventive ways euphemisms are created and enter our language.

So, you may be asking, what is a euphemism?  Here is the author’s definition:

…words or phrases substituted for ones that make us uneasy.

I also found the following definition at Dictionary.com:

An inoffensive word or phrase substituted for one considered offensive or hurtful, especially one concerned with religion, sex, death, or excreta.

When I originally started reading this book, I thought it was going to be more like a dictionary of euphemisms.  It does explain what a lot of euphemisms mean, but this book also explains how many of the things we say, and how we say them, came to be.  It also looks into some of the reasons we euphemize.

I didn’t realize how often we use euphemisms.  Since I started reading this book, I have been noticing them in my conversations with others, in advertising, on TV…all over.

We mostly euphemise to help everyone feel comfortable with the language we are using.

For example, would you rather I said “He farted as soon as he sat on his butt” or would “He floofered as soon as he sat on his bottom” be better?  Ok, not a great example, but you get the idea.  The second one sounds less offensive to me than the first one does because I replaced the offensive words with less offensive words.

It was interesting to learn what kinds of euphemisms were used a long time ago and how those have transformed into how we speak today.

The author mentioned how the use of euphemisms can make communication a lot harder, since we aren’t actually saying what we mean.  We kind of dance around our meaning and hope that the other person undertsands what we are saying.

I enjoyed this book and felt like I learned some new ideas.  If you are interested in euphemisms and their origins, I would recommend this book to you.

A word of warning…this book does contain swear words and sexual words in order to show how we euphemise them.  So, if this would bother you, then this isn’t the book for you.  I’m usually annoyed and bothered when there is bad language in a book that I’m reading, but since this book was about how we make offensive words less offensive, it didn’t bother me as much because I understood why they were included in the book.

People can get really creative when it comes to euphemizing.  Does your family use any unique euphemisms?

Anybody remember Jim Carrey’s movie Liar, Liar?  Remember when he told his son that sometimes grown-ups have to lie?  Well, this book is sort of an explanation for that statement.  It’s not so much that we have to tell untruths, but verbal and written communication can just be difficult without some way of softening things or coming at them obliquely.

This isn’t to say that all recourse to euphemism equals deception, of course.  Sometimes it’s done in an honest attempt to talk around a topic without saying anything offensive or to avoid being explicit (particularly when explaining morbid or embarrassing things to children).

Keyes takes in the history of this tendency to euphemize, starting from ancient times, through the extremely productive (euphemistically speaking, of course) Victorian era, and down to our current society that seems completely obsessed with euphemisms.

Right up front here, I have to point out that in discussing topics rife with euphemisms, the book of course discusses a bawdy issue or two and ventures into scatology not a few times.  But if you’re not squeamish or easily offended, I think you’ll find it as fascinating and hilarious as I did.

Mr. Keyes points out that we tend to go to a euphemism for whatever makes us nervous, afraid, or uncomfortable.  For early societies, this meant not referring to dangerous predators by name, or not naming the deities they feared.  For Victorians, this meant that someone wishing to order a breast, thigh, and leg of chicken needed to ask for “white meat, dark meat, and a drumstick.”  I find it hard to believe “leg” was ever considered offensive, but then again, I grew up in a house where saying “butt” or “fart” was forbidden.  (Either offense earned you a trip to the bathroom, which room is also euphemistically named, since while it’s true that bathing can be done there, you don’t “go to the bathroom” in the tub.  Unless you’re sleepwalking.  Trust me, I know.)

One of the interesting and tricky things about euphemisms is that you can never predict where they’ll come up.

Much as we might like to think that our modes of expression involve a straight trajectory of opening up, shedding inhibitions, and becoming more candid, that’s just not the case.  The terms and targets of our euphemizing have simply shifted.  An explosion of topics have become eligible for euphemistic discourse: not only the usual suspects of sex, body parts, and bodily secretions, but also money, diseases, and certain foods, to name just a few of the many subjects we euphemize today.

The chapters on sexuality and anatomy were quite amusing, the one covering excretions absolutely hysterical, but I really found the chapters on finance and politics quite intriguing.  It’s not market crash, it’s a “correction.”  It’s not an attack ad (that’s what the other side does), it’s a “contrast ad.”  Actually, it’s all mud-slinging.

The range of some of the euphemisms for certain categories is truly mind-boggling.  Mental Floss had an article not long ago about Ben Franklin’s 200+ euphemisms for “drunk.”  Think he might’ve tossed back a few in his time?  (The flossers also have a quiz titled “Monty Python Phrase or Ben Franklin Synonym for Drunk?”  And no, you can’t resist it.  Search your feelings; you know it to be true.)

If you aren’t noticing, I’m giving a thumbs-up to this book.  If you’re into language at all, you’ll love it.  It also looks like Keyes has a number of other extremely likely candidates for my To Be Read list.  But for now I shall resist.  I really must someday read one of the books I’ve actually purchased to read.

And now I have a couple of personal examples and then some philosophizing on the cycle of euphemisms.

When I was a kid, we had a family joke about sterilization procedures, whether performed on animals or humans.  It was all “back surgery” due to a surreptitious prayer request for a member (why did I use that word?) of our congregation.

Another example involved a former college roommate of The Fair Elaine, who got quite a kick out of a chemistry professor’s repeated use of the word “spigot” in a laboratory lecture.  Because in her family, the spigot was the distinctive anatomical feature of the human male.

This whole thing reminds me of one of those “real things said in court” emails:

Q: You were shot in the fracas?

A: No, I was shot midway between the fracas and the navel.

When I was a kid, you had to be very careful in my circle of friends to call your two-wheeled conveyance a “bicycle,” because “bike” had turned into our euphemism for the region of a boy’s anatomy typically covered by a protective device from Bike Sports Equipment.  Choruses of dumb laughter would erupt whenever any hapless outliers used the shortened word.  They just weren’t in the “in” crowd.

And here’s where the philosophizing comes in.  Think about the words “vulgar” and “profane.”  Look them up.  I’ll wait.  Okay, either you looked or you didn’t.  They both mean “common” (though profane is closer to unholy, but then holy means “set apart,” and “not set apart” could mean “common.”)  But the connotation of both of them is “something I’m too good for.”

So a word crops up and becomes the term “everyone” uses, making it vulgar.  The uppity folks among us then eschew its use in favor of some euphemism.  Eventually it, too, becomes part of the culture, and “everyone” is using it.  At which point the new word is vulgar.  And so we introduce a new new word and think it’s somehow better than the old one.  We also think that the old one is objectively objectionable.  And it isn’t.

(This is one reason I’m not really that offended by swearing, at least in certain contexts.  I don’t really mind if someone refers to manure in a different way than I do, and I’m not really concerned if someone says “damn” instead of “darn,” because they both express the same sentiment.  If they’re adding extra f-words to all their dialogue, however, I’m not a fan.  And I must say, I’m not at all a fan of OMG or its derivatives.  Though I’m willing to let “Oh my dawth” go for personal reasons.)

It’s also unfortunate that this euphemistic cycle deprives us of perfectly good words.  There are some people who really fit the description that C.S. Lewis would have labeled “an ass.”  But you might get a nasty look should you characterize them in this way during intercourse with your friends.  (Did that word shock you there?  Look it up.  It doesn’t have to refer to married-people-things.)

I’m getting to the bottom of my library pile, and I’m seriously toying with just returning one of the books I’ve started.  If all goes well, I should finish Bloody Crimes soon.  And then I’ll start on my purchased book backlog.

Oh, and check back for a Foney Friday post this week.  It’s gold, Jerry!  Gold!

Poultry presented all manner of verbal pitfalls at this time. “Cock” in particular posed serious problems. This word was short for “cockerel,” a male chicken. But “cock” was also short for “watercock,” the spigot of a barrel, leading it to become slang for “penis.” Unfortunately, that tainted term was embedded in many others. In the United States especially, previously innocent terms such as “cockeyed” and “cocksure” could no longer be used when both sexes were present. Under this regimen, “weathercocks” became weathervanes; “haycocks,” haystacks; and “apricocks,” apricots. Those burdened with last names such as “Hitchcock” and “Leacock” began to feel under siege. In response, an American family named “Alcocke” changed their name to Alcox. Fearing that this might not be adequate, before siring a daughter named Louisa May in 1832, Bronson Alcox became Bronson Alcott.

Love this book – I actually bought two – one for me and I sent one to my daughter. It is a really interesting and easy read that makes you think about where some of our language has come from.

Will pass it on to others when I’ve finished it.

Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms

Ralph Keyes. Little, Brown, $24.99 (288p) ISBN 978-0-316-05656-4

EUPHEMANIA: OUR LOVE AFFAIR WITH EUPHEMISMS explores the history, culture and literature of euphemisms, offering a lively discussion tracing the origins and changing usage of language. Politics, doublespeak and social commentary blend in a hilarious, pointed and fun literary and social assessment filled with examples and perfect for any general lending library.

Midwest Book Review

This is the first e-book that I ever read. Not that it’s relevant to the review of the book itself, but somehow it seems important to note following all of the physical books that I’ve reviewed on Amazon since 2001. I heard the author interviewed on the radio and the topic of how and all cultures substitute vague words and phrases for events and objects which are considered distasteful seemed like great material for a fun read. Over all, I was not disappointed. (As an aside, the e-reading experience didn’t completely win me over, but that’s a different review…)

Ralph Keyes guides the reader on a diverting tour of all sorts of euphemisms, from those used to describe bodily functions to those used to avoid giving offense to minority groups, as well as those we use to make ourselves a little more comfortable discussing things that feel just a little too personal. Euphemisms sanitize, deflect and skirt around topics that people of good taste lower their voices or close doors to discuss. And boy, there are more than enough common euphemisms out there to fill an entire book.

At first, I thought that there was a risk that the book might constrain itself to the scatological or the sexual (obvious targets for the subject) and, to be sure, he devotes considerable time to these topics, but he aims for a wider, more inclusive scope. While there’s a good bit of humor in “Euphemania,” it’s not all snickers and giggles. In addition to humorous euphemisms, he also covers serious topics like the verbal misdirection employed by governments and the military, examining how they can be used to manipulate. There’s also a decent treatment of the anthropological underpinnings of the entire concept of euphemisms and why they’re so necessary to oil social interaction.

Gary Schroeder

“Euphemania: Our Love Affair With Euphemisms” by Ralph Keyes (Little, Brown, $24.99)

Was Shakespeare right? Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet? Surely, being Shakespeare, he was right, his point being that what matters is what something is, not what it is called.

The rest of us, however, not being Shakespeare, beg to differ. Many times the important thing is what something is called. And, as Ralph Keyes demonstrates in his delightful “Euphemania: Our Love Affair With Euphemisms,” frequently that is not sweet at all.

“Euphemania” is not a compilation of euphemisms (though it contains plenty), “but a consideration of the ways euphemisms enter our conversations and how they reflect their time and place.” Keyes, a journalist and author of several other books, says his theme is that euphemisms are a barometer of changing attitudes, placing a spotlight on what most concerns humans at any given time.

“Euphemism” derives from Eupheme, the nurse to the Muses of ancient Greece. The name literally means “good speaking.” The author’s definition of euphemism is broad, taking in slang, jargon, and double entendres: “words or phrases substituted for ones that make us uneasy.”

That which makes us uneasy has changed dramatically over time. Once meant to avoid blasphemy and impoliteness, euphemisms today are regularly used to obfuscate and to cover up embarrassing situations. Negatives are changed into positives‚Äî”life insurance” is really “death insurance” ‚Äî or the vivid (“dumps”) is replaced by the innocuous (“landfills”).

In general, euphemisms for sexual activity have lost much of their judgmental flavor. We have gone from “living in sin” to “without benefit of clergy” to “shacking up” to “living together,” the last being hardly a euphemism at all.

What inspires the most secretiveness and taboos ‚Äî more than sex, body parts, disease and death ‚Äî is money. We tiptoe around finances for many reasons, including gentility and self-preservation, but also, especially in today’s world of high finance, to create a verbal fog, to camouflage and obfuscate or to make something sound the very opposite of what it is.

All of this brings to mind George Orwell’s comment, “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” Politics, war and international affairs are just as rich in this sort of doublespeak. The Bush administration enshrined its easing of environmental regulations as the Clean Air Act. Outright defeat becomes “defensive victory” and a missile that can kill tens of millions is called the Peacekeeper.

Keyes gives several reasons we euphemize: among others, to comfort ourselves, to preserve privacy, to demarcate class, and as “code” within groups (“dog whistle discourse” that only the cognoscenti ‚Äî such as families with pet private euphemisms ‚Äî can understand). Humans have invented an infinite number of ways to say not quite what they mean.

– ROGER K. MILLER

His new book is Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms.

Keyes lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where he writes, lectures, and is a Trustee of the Antioch Writers’ Workshop.

Recently I asked him what he was reading.  His reply:

I recently read, and loved Room. By being able to capture the distinctive voice of a unique five-year-old and have him tell a riveting story Emma Donoghue has created a literary tour de force. Winter’s Bone is another captivating novel, especially when the author lets his Ozark characters tell their story in their own voice. (When he describes the terrain in elaborate language apparently meant to impress fellow alums of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Daniel Woodrell’s book lags.) I just finished Amos Oz’s memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness which has moments of great insight and some powerfully written passages, but overall is twice too long. Oz never uses one word when ten will do. The writer whose work I’ve most admired in recent years is Richard Russo, especially his novels set in declining towns (Empire Falls, Nobody’s Fool, Bridge of Sighs, etc.) Russo gets you to care deeply about his woebegone characters, no mean feat. He also can be drop-dead funny.

“You son-of-a-bitch!” like many exclamations takes on a different meaning with different voice inflections and in different contexts. Remember the old story of the preacher who was mad but wouldn’t curse, so he told his adversary, “When you get home, I hope your mother runs out from under the porch and bites you on the leg!” According to Ralph Keyes, author of Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms, language is in constant flux just as our social values. He says, “Good words become bad words become good words again, in endless succession,” – a virtual “euphemism carousel.”

Euphemisms are actually just synonyms – or at least a type of synonym. We use and invent them to lower the temperature of “hot button” words or subjects. We use this device to neutralize words that make us feel uncomfortable. Our culture does the same thing generally and hence, “political correctness.” Keyes says, “Euphemisms are an accurate barometer of changing attitudes,” and that is the theme of his book.

Just as some felt that religion was a tool of the state and aristocracy to control the masses, now many feel that language has become an instrument of commercial, political and postmodern doublespeak. Reminds me of 1984. California researchers, Bandler and Grinder made a case for our individual choices of words being an insight to our psyche. According to them, our subconscious choice of predicates was significant. If that’s correct, what does it say about our conscious use of euphemisms?

Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms is not a reference book, although it does have a complete bibliography and a thorough index. Unlike a dictionary or thesaurus, it isn’t intended as a quick look up type book. Rather it is filled with stories and commentaries on both historical and contemporary euphemisms.

Stories make the history and evolution of our language both charming and memorable. The Smothers Brothers employed the creativity of their writers along with their ulterior motives to slip puns and cultural references (often sexual) by the censors. Others, like George Carlin and Lenny Bruce were more blunt. Perhaps as much as any famous politician, Winston Churchill was the source of many stories involving not just language, but the differences in usage of the same language by different countries (Wilde and Shaw). No doubt, William Safire would have reveled in participation in this discussion. Despite the changes in our culture and society, we still seem to have problems/issues/opportunities with sex, anatomy, death, war, and money. Is Playboy a “skin mag” or a “gentlemen’s” publication? Keyes offers absorbing, interesting, and often humorous stories of how we use words. Whether you are a writer, reader or both, Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms deserves a spot in your library, perhaps right next to Word Origins and Their Romantic Stories.

http://technorati.com/entertainment/article/euphemania-our-love-affair-with-euphemisms/

BY ROGER K. MILLER

Published: February 27, 2011

“Euphemania: Our Love Affair With Euphemisms” by Ralph Keyes (Little, Brown, $24.99)

Was Shakespeare right? Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet? Surely, being Shakespeare, he was right, his point being that what matters is what something is, not what it is called.

The rest of us, however, not being Shakespeare, beg to differ. Many times the important thing is what something is called. And, as Ralph Keyes demonstrates in his delightful “Euphemania: Our Love Affair With Euphemisms,” frequently that is not sweet at all.

“Euphemania” is not a compilation of euphemisms (though it contains plenty), “but a consideration of the ways euphemisms enter our conversations and how they reflect their time and place.” Keyes, a journalist and author of several other books, says his theme is that euphemisms are a barometer of changing attitudes, placing a spotlight on what most concerns humans at any given time.

“Euphemism” derives from Eupheme, the nurse to the Muses of ancient Greece. The name literally means “good speaking.” The author’s definition of euphemism is broad, taking in slang, jargon, and double entendres: “words or phrases substituted for ones that make us uneasy.”

That which makes us uneasy has changed dramatically over time. Once meant to avoid blasphemy and impoliteness, euphemisms today are regularly used to obfuscate and to cover up embarrassing situations. Negatives are changed into positives—”life insurance” is really “death insurance” — or the vivid (“dumps”) is replaced by the innocuous (“landfills”).

In general, euphemisms for sexual activity have lost much of their judgmental flavor. We have gone from “living in sin” to “without benefit of clergy” to “shacking up” to “living together,” the last being hardly a euphemism at all.

What inspires the most secretiveness and taboos — more than sex, body parts, disease and death — is money. We tiptoe around finances for many reasons, including gentility and self-preservation, but also, especially in today’s world of high finance, to create a verbal fog, to camouflage and obfuscate or to make something sound the very opposite of what it is.

All of this brings to mind George Orwell’s comment, “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” Politics, war and international affairs are just as rich in this sort of doublespeak. The Bush administration enshrined its easing of environmental regulations as the Clean Air Act. Outright defeat becomes “defensive victory” and a missile that can kill tens of millions is called the Peacekeeper.

Keyes gives several reasons we euphemize: among others, to comfort ourselves, to preserve privacy, to demarcate class, and as “code” within groups (“dog whistle discourse” that only the cognoscenti — such as families with pet private euphemisms — can understand). Humans have invented an infinite number of ways to say not quite what they mean.

Roger K. Miller’s latest novel is “Dragon in Amber”

Sunday, February 20, 2011

I was reading a book about euphemisms just as federal spending was being relabeled “investments” and new dietary guidelines turned hamburgers into “solid fats and added sugar.”

The government can’t talk without euphemisms, but, then again, neither can the rest of us.

Ralph Keyes, a Yellow Springs author of many books, explains why in Euphemania: Our Love Affair With Euphemisms (Little, Brown; 279 pages; $24.99).

“Any word or phrase that gives us pause is a candidate for euphemizing,” Keyes writes. “What gives us pause varies from place to place, however, and from era to era.”

Surely, few eras were as wacky as the 18th and 19th centuries, when the growing middle class in England became particularly prudish about language.

Keyes notes that every body part needed a euphemism, so legs became limbs and breasts became bosoms. Even poultry parts were considered unmentionable.

Eventually, Americans followed suit, leading to a delightful Winston Churchill story. At a dinner party in Virginia, he was reprimanded by a woman who said his request for a chicken breast should have been phrased more delicately as “white meat.”

Keyes writes: “The next day, Churchill sent the woman a corsage with the message ‘Pin this on your white meat.’”

Euphemisms cover all phases of life, but government is almost unthinkable without them.

As wars became increasingly bloody in the 20th century, governments – including ours – worked all the harder to sanitize the language around them, Keyes says.

Invasions became incursions, doomsday missiles were dubbed Peacekeepers, and dead soldiers became the fallen.

In the 21st century, torture was redefined as enhanced interrogation and escalation as a surge (“making the massive influx of fresh American troops into Iraq sound like a soft drink,” Keyes writes).

Less deadly matters also inspire euphemisms. Last week, President Barack Obama was selling the investments in his budgets. Another term for them is spending.

Meanwhile, a federal agency announced that it could find no evidence that Toyotas accelerate on their own. That leaves only one other possibility: bad driving. The government chose a softer term: pedal misapplication.

Americans are also trying to digest the new federal dietary guidelines. As nutrition expert Marion Nestle notes, politicians dare not annoy the beef and pork industries by urging people to eat less meat.

They instead advise eating fewer solid fats and added sugars, or “SoFAS” for short. (Perhaps couch potatoes will be more likely to listen.)

Predictably, a good deal of the book is devoted to euphemisms for sex or the body parts involved in it. Many of the euphemisms are more descriptive than the terms they’re trying to hide.

But I won’t go into that, because, this being a family newspaper, I’d have to invent euphemisms for the euphemisms.

Joe Blundo is a Dispatch columnist.

It seems appropriate to allow Churchill the final word. His response is difficult to top when discussing the pitfalls of euphemism.

As lovers of language know, the byways of English—its patterns and its idiosyncrasies—reveal a great deal about its users. Euphemisms are perhaps the most revealing byway of all.

One of the most insidious of all euphemisms shows up on the illustrated jacket of Ralph Keyes’s book: the term “friendly fire.” For those of us publishing nonfiction or fiction about American military invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam—to name three obvious wars—why are we softening the ugly reality of U.S. soldiers shooting other U.S. soldiers with the happy sounding (“friendly”) phrase?

Most of our readers will understand the underlying meaning of the term. But do those readers require an escape from ugly reality? And do other readers end up confused by the euphemism?

Lots of books about language convey “fun”—the fun of puns and jokes and famous quotations and homonyms and anagrams. Euphemisms, on the other hand, may be fun, but are not always fun and games.

Keyes recognizes the dangers to a society of relying on euphemisms—of, for example, “mincing words” (one chapter title) and using “brave new words” (another chapter title) to create an ambiguous and maybe downright harmful brave new world.

Here’s a key paragraph from Keyes’ playbook:

“Euphemisms are nothing if not adaptable. A BBC correspondent just back from covering the conflict in [the] Congo told a radio interviewer that soldiers there were ‘self provisioning.’ When asked what this meant, the correspondent conceded that was a euphemism for ‘loot and steal.’ Obviously, language evolves constantly. But in public discourse especially, its evolution has been in a blandly euphemistic direction. Taken to an extreme, as it so often is, such discourse can be deadly. That’s because it enlists words in the service of evasion rather than communication.”

The word “lying” sounds harsh. It should, because lies are hurtful. “Spinning” sounds less harsh. But “spinning” constitutes “lying,” so why not call it what it is?”

This is what Keyes terms euphemania—taking the sting out of frank, clear words by converting them into inoffensive, synonym-like versions that desensitize us to the implications of, say, torture (“applying pressure”) or a stock market collapse (“equity retreat”).”

As Keyes surveys the territory of euphemania, he devotes distinct chapters to euphemisms for sexual acts, parts of the human anatomy, defecation/urination, diseases, death, food, money and warfare.

It would be easy to fill the Paste website with remarkable examples that Keyes elucidates. One I have unthinkingly written hundreds of times (especially when serving as a Washington, D.C., correspondent for newspapers and magazines) involves the word “special.” As in “Joe Jones, the special assistant to Defense Secretary Dick Cheney.”

What, if anything, is “special” about that special assistant named Joe Jones? What is so special about Joe Jones’s job that it should be termed “special?” Keyes cites another scholar of euphemisms, R.W. Holder, author of How Not to Say What You Mean, as stating “special” is a word that “makes the ears of a collector of euphemisms prick up.”

Other mea culpas: Why have I failed to challenge the government agency called the Defense Department, when Offense Department would often seem more appropriate? Why have I allowed climate change skeptics to define the degradation as an “issue” instead of as a “problem?” Why have I allowed an entire controversial industry to market “life insurance” instead of “death insurance?”

Many writers come dangerously close to crossing the line of untruth by, well, mincing words. Keyes points out the writers who term somebody “flushed” instead of “drunk;” exhibits “gravitas” instead of “pompousness;” “colorful” instead of “loudmouthed;” “mercurial” instead of “bad tempered.”

It is rarely pleasant to write about male impotence. But does that justify using the term “erectile dysfunction?”

I can’t stop just yet. That’s because euphemisms are about censorship, too, and, like all writers who make their living with words, I hate what censorship does to a virile democratic society. “Using euphemisms is the verbal equivalent of draping nude statues,” Keyes comments, and I do not want anybody in the society where I reside to decide that nude statues ought to be draped.

Hooray for the language lovers practicing what Keyes calls “candor restoration,” honing the edges of English. A group of lesbian motorcyclists term themselves “Dykes on Bikes.” Eve Ensler titles her play “Vagina Monologues.” Dick Gregory and Randall Kennedy both publish books titled “Nigger,” hoping public use of a taboo word will defang it. Other anti-euphemism heroes include James Joyce, Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence, Anais Nin, Lenny Bruce, George Carlin and Richard Pryor.

I’m not a famous anti-euphemism hero. (Yet.) But I work hard as a writer and citizen to say what I mean. I have resided in two metropolises where my Caucasian heritage placed me in the minority. Still, I never use the term “inner city” or the term” ghetto” to mean a place where low-income blacks live. When euphemisms double as insulting racial or ethnic or gender stereotypes, the destruction doubles, too.

So … please, think before you speak. Or write. And thank Ralph Keyes for spending years compiling examples for a book about language that goes beyond mere fun. He’s a real spin-meister.

– Steve Weinberg

February 13, 2011

What could be more fun than mocking yesterday’s euphemisms? Open a copy of Mencken’s “The American Language” and you find our American forebears exclaiming “nerts!” (to avoid the naughty “nuts!”) and calling their legs “limbs” or “benders.” Then there are the benighted Brits, for whom Poe’s “The Gold Bug” was retitled “The Golden Beetle,” since “bug” to them meant only the (unmentionable) bedbug.

We may not be quite so delicate today, but euphemism — from the Greek for “auspicious speech” — is with us still. Our rooster and weather vane date from the 19th century, when cock became too vivid for polite American discourse. (So strong was the taboo that Bronson Alcocke, father of Louisa May, changed the family name to Alcott.) For public tough talk about courage, we translate our favorite English slang into Spanish, like George W. Bush and Sarah Palin, and compliment folks on their cojones. (Or tone it down further, George Will-style, and ask if a leader has the “kidneys” for the job.)

Euphemisms can be private or public, trivial or deadly, serious or joky — but they can’t be dispensed with, says Ralph Keyes in his new book “Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms.” So long as humans have had things to be discreet about, they’ve had names that furnish some rhetorical distance from the things themselves. “Penis, Latin for ‘tail,’ in Cicero’s time was put to work as a euphemism for the male sex organ,” notes Keyes. (And just as some writers groused, in recent decades, that a former meaning of gay had been filched from them, Cicero complained that he could no longer call a tail a tail, now that the word meant something else.)

For modern Americans, of course, penis is just the scientifically correct name. Over the centuries, the job of euphemizing the organ has been handed off to hundreds of other words, some short-lived and others more durable. This is the typical life of a euphemism: a ride on what Keyes calls the “euphemism carousel” and Steven Pinker called the “euphemism treadmill.” By either metaphor, a euphemism wears out as it becomes too familiarly linked to the thing it designates; its distancing powers fade, and it’s abandoned, temporarily or permanently, for a newer term.

Any word, however inoffensive it looks, can wear out its welcome this way. It’s hard to imagine a more abstract word than undertaker, for instance: “One who undertakes a task.” But as a euphemism for “one who handles funerals,” it acquired a morbid aura in less than 200 years. By the end of the 19th century, writes Keyes, “undertakers had promoted themselves first to funeral directors, then to morticians…presumably because it sounded like ‘physician.’ ”

This process takes time, naturally; at the moment, some American parents think butt is a fine word for kids to use, while others still hear it as vulgar. Specific terms aside, though, we all know how to tailor our language to the audience of the moment. Even the most plain-spoken among us seem content with a world where some words are off limits to 3-year-olds and radio bloviators. And this euphemizing of intimate matters — death, bodily functions, sex — seems like a perfectly reasonable social contract: I’ll pretend I would never picture you on the toilet, or in your coffin, if you’ll pretend the same in return.

But euphemisms, as Keyes notes, aren’t limited to these universal human realms. They also have their dark, Orwellian public side. And the use of euphemism by the powerful — insiders and authorities of all stripes — involves a different relationship between the euphemizer and euphemizee. We all know what “passed away” really means, whether it’s our idiom or not. But when a finance guy euphemizes risky investments as “subprime loans” or a military officer calls dead civilians “collateral damage,” the obfuscating language can begin to sound like professional terminology — the equivalent of the doctor’s “MI” for “heart attack” — rather than what it is, an intentional attempt at misdirection. When euphemisms cover up things we aren’t familiar with (and often don’t want to know better), they’re much more insidious than the polite evasions of everyday life.

In fact, the whole subject would be easier to talk about if we assigned euphemisms to two separate categories — benign and malign, maybe. To call the room where you urinate a “bathroom” or refer to a sexual act as “sleeping with” is hardly sinister; it’s merely following a set of cultural expectations, just like using napkins or saying “please pass the salt.” Describing a patient’s MRI as “worrisome” rather than “dire” may be a (temporary) hedge, but it’s also a human gesture.

But telling citizens that torture is “abuse” and mercenaries are “contractors” — or in Orwell’s words, that burning and bombing villages is “pacification” — is a different sort of enterprise. These euphemisms — the top-down terminology invented and deployed to serve the interests of the coiners — are the ones that give “euphemism” a bad name.

– Jan Freeman

Transcript below:

MELISSA BLOCK, host:

This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I’m Melissa Block.

ROBERT SIEGEL, host:

And I’m Robert Siegel.

In his new book about euphemisms, Ralph Keyes takes me back to browsing through a book on my parents’ bookshelf about 50 years ago. It was a psychology text, probably written sometime before the Second World War, probably for some education course my father took. And it described the precise ranges of IQ that defined an idiot, a moron and an imbecile.

My father instructed me that those terms and the broad category that included them all, the feeble-minded, were old ways of saying what we now said more properly. Such people were not to be called feeble-minded, idiotic, imbecilic or moronic. They were to be called retarded, mentally retarded. It was only deep into adulthood that I realized after using that word, that phrase, that it had become completely unacceptable.

So it goes with euphemisms. One generation’s version of polite and scientific is the next generation’s standard for ham-fisted and defamatory.

How and why this happens is the stuff of Ralph Keyes’ book, “Euphemania.” And the author joins us now from Yellow Springs, Ohio.

Welcome.

Mr. RALPH KEYES (Author, “Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms”): Thank you.

SIEGEL: And I want you to explain the point you make in this book that many of the expressions, which we avoid by using euphemisms instead, were themselves introduced as euphemisms.

Mr. KEYES: That happens all the time, Robert. Look at what’s happening with hookup. I’m old enough to remember if I said 20, 25 years ago, I’m going to hookup with my wife in Grand Central Station, nobody would have batted an eyelash. If I said that today, I would be in deep doo-doo.

SIEGEL: To use a euphemism. Our challenge here is to discuss things for which we use euphemisms precisely because we don’t want to discuss them.

Mr. KEYES: Exactly.

SIEGEL: And a big part of what you’re talking about in the book is bodily functions. Why are we so squeamish about bodily functions?

Mr. KEYES: Well, there’s been a lot of research that shows whatever disgusts us is a prime candidate for euphemism, and so we come up with different words to refer to them. At one time, the word body wax was a euphemism for excrement.

SIEGEL: And as you write, there are a great many words that have a Latinate, scientific air about them. Defecate is one…

Mr. KEYES: Yeah. Yup.

SIEGEL: They sound authoritatively authentic, but as often as not, they were just dug up to replace some coarser words.

Mr. KEYES: Exactly. Copulate is a Latinate word that simply meant at one time joined together. Then, of course, it became a euphemism for a certain kind of joining together, and now that’s pretty much all it means.

SIEGEL: At the end of “Euphemania,” your book, you turn to linguistics and evolutionary biology for a theory, which I find very interesting, of why blurting some words in moments of anger or fear or pain may be fundamentally different from expressing ourselves reasonably with language. And therein may lie the difference between some words that we use without thinking, and then the way we think how not to use them.

Mr. KEYES: Yes. It’s well-known that some people who suffer certain kinds of stroke lose their ability to speak, but they don’t lose their ability to curse. And this has led linguistic researchers to conclude that swearing comes from a very primitive part of our brain and almost as not language at all. It’s closer, say, to a dog’s barking than to actual sophisticated conversation.

So euphemisms, the ability to create indirect ways of referring to topics that make us uncomfortable, I think, illustrates a fairly high order of intelligence and evolution.

You know, when Shakespeare called the sex act, making the beast with two backs, we had a very creative mind at work.

SIEGEL: An area of language where it’s less obvious to me why we should have so many euphemisms is eating and food. There’s a whole – OK, many euphemisms surrounding food.

Mr. KEYES: Well, there certainly are. You think back to the words sweetbreads for the thymus glands. Who wants to eat thymus glands? But sweetbreads doesn’t sound so bad. Rocky Mountain oysters for fried calves’ testicles or lambs’ testicles.

But we don’t even have to go that far back. The fish we today call Chilean sea bass, and have for the last 30-some years, originally was called the Patagonian toothfish – not too appetizing. Orange roughy is a euphemism for the fish that was originally called the slimehead.

SIEGEL: But the Patagonian toothfish is the case of a name for fish. And there’s this – a man who renamed it Chilean sea bass. That was actually a piece of marketing.

Mr. KEYES: Yes, Lee Lantz, a fish wholesaler in Los Angeles. And he just said, this is a good fish. Nobody wants to eat it. Let’s just change the name. He came up with Chilean sea bass. And voila, it became so popular under the new name, that now there’s a movement to limit its catch and limit eating it in restaurants.

SIEGEL: At one time, you remark, to mention – just to say legs – I guess this is in the Victorian era – to speak of legs, right there, this would be a remarkably rude thing to introduce into conversation.

Mr. KEYES: Yes. Legs were considered a very suggestive part of the anatomy. Women in Victorian times not only covered them up, but they thought that using the very word was suggestive. So you were not supposed to say leg. You said limb.

SIEGEL: Extremities was also…

Mr. KEYES: Extremities is a – yes, is another word. And this then got carried over, going back to food, into poultry. You know, when you were invited to have dinner at someone’s house, you knew better than to ask for a leg. You asked for a drumstick.

When Winston Churchill, after World War I, was eating at a wealthy home in Virginia, the butler asked him what kind of chicken meat he’d like. And he said, some breasts, please. Well, the woman next to him blanched and said, we don’t use that word here. And Mr. Churchill said, well, what word do you use? She said, white meat. So the next day, he sent the woman a corsage with a card stuck in the middle that said, stick this on your white meat.

(Soundbite of laughter)

SIEGEL: Ralph Keyes, thank you very much for talking with us today.

Mr. KEYES: Thank you, Mr. Siegel.

SIEGEL: Ralph Keyes is the author of “Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms.”

This compendium of quotes from Oscar Wilde is arranged by subject matter alphabetically and provides a great deal of entertainment for $7 bucks. Not to mention it is the ultimate source for witty quotations to make you the life of the party. Seriously, a great book to page through at random for some laughs and thought provoking witticisms from the most quotable modern author.

R. J. Marsella (California)

Oscar Wilde once said “Drama is the meeting place of art and life.” In this essential, compact volume Ralph Keyes leaves a trail to that corner by gathering the flamboyant author’s thorniest, at times most insightful quotes and anecdotes. Keyes uses Wilde’s plays, reviews, letters, interrogations, even conversational repartee (given its own section) which remained Wilde’s signature to his time.

Keyes divides Wilde’s epigrams and puns into brief, easily readable sections. Wilde twists traditional views on permanent truths and those of his day: altruism (“Charity creates a multitude of sins.”) history (“History is merely gossip.”) theology, poverty, dissent (“Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.”)

Above all, Wilde (through Keyes’ selections) quips and dissects each of the fine arts (music, prose, painting) and roles for creator, viewer, interpreter. He addresses the writer (“Even prophets correct their proofs.”) critic (“Criticism is the highest form of autobiography”), and artist (“Like the Greek gods, artists are known only to each other.”)

Amid his fast-paced one liners on male-female relations you sense how Wilde viewed marriage over and above his well-known bromide, “Divorces are made in heaven.” The book ends with Wilde explaining and defending the homosexual relationship he called “the love that dare not speak its name”. Whether or not you accept Wilde’s lifestyle preferences, his eloquent, sad defense of a letter he wrote a younger man is moving as he describes the unique merge of intellect and youthful energy which to him formed “the noblest sort of affection.” It is as close to heartfelt as anyone could get who once said, “A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.”

Oscar Wilde was parodied, vilified, and eventually imprisoned for his beliefs and flamboyance. But he eventually influenced artists from George Bernard Shaw to John Lennon, staking a claim as the earliest example of a postmodern artist. This book helps introduce Wilde’s full books and plays (Keyes references them consistently and provides a full bibliography), or helps you reference witty, intellectual (or pseudo-intellectual, as Wilde might have preferred) quotes for any occasion. (As to plagiarizing, Wilde himself called it, “the privilege of the appreciative man.”) His full literary courses are nutritious and filling enough, but The Wit and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde is as savory when reading or writing as salt is when dining.

Anthony G. Pizza (Florida)

camianacademy.homeschooljournal.net/archives/94

I read the book of Truman quotations in a couple of hours. The author was very selective, focusing on the Give’em hell, Harry one-liners and sound-bites. Truman had a charming sense of humor and a unique manner of expressing himself. If that’s what you are looking for, this is a good book. I’m glad I bought it.

What I missed was the more thoughtful expressions of Truman about the beginnings of the Cold War, which began in Truman’s mind when he met Stalin at Potsdam; the expression of the matured, post New Deal version of Liberalism, which hatched in his brain after the death of Roosevelt; his dislike of the the presidency; and his candid opinions of the powerful men with whom he interacted.

“We had won the war. It was my hope now that the people of Germany and Japan could be rehabilitated…. The United States wanted no territory, no reparations. Peace and happiness for all countries were the goals toward which we would work and for which we had fought. No nation in the history of the world had taken such a position in complete victory. No nation with the military power of the United States of America had been so generous to its enemies and so helpful to its friends. Maybe the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount could be put into effect.” — from Truman’s Memoirs

T. Duke (West Texas)

This book was an excellent insight into the President who never lost sight of the fact that he was nothing more than a common man. Refreshing attitudes that we do not seem to see in politicians today. In his own words, on many subjects, and shooting from the hip his words provide a greater understanding to what Harry Truman was made of. I recommend this book to anyone who would like to know more about Harry Truman or anyone who has an interest in U.S. history.

The Highlander (Richfield, PA)

This is not a full-scale biography of Harry Truman, but it would serve as a fabulous introduction to him. This is a short book, but contains a wealth of personal anecdotes, quotes and compilations from Truman’s private conversations and letters. It’s so refreshing to reflect upon Truman, a politician who almost always said what he thought and did what he thought best. There was no posturing with him, no p.r. campaigns, no manipulating the media. Every morning he would take his 2 mile stroll (at a clip of 15 minutes per mile, not bad for a man over 60), and the press would be running after him, hoping for a quote for the morning paper.

Also included in the book is information on Truman’s close relationship with this anchor, Bess, as well as their daughter, Margaret. The famous episode where Truman attacked a columnist for ridiculing Margaret’s singing voice is included. If you’re unfamiliar with this, it will definitely make you laugh! Truman was rough around the edges, yet a highly skilled and intelligent man; he was well-read, articulate in a plain sort of way and an astute judge of character. His opinions on Ike and MacArthur justify the purchase of this book. Enjoy!

Candace Scott (Lake Arrowhead, CA, USA)

This collection of quotes, letters, and anecdotes gives the reader a comprehensive overview of Truman’s life as well as insight into the kind of man he truly was. This book allows the reader to feel connected to Truman in a way a biography can not.

“liw” (Kansas City, MO)

This is a wonderful collection of quotes, letters, and anecdotes which together give the reader a quick view of Truman’s life as well as a mental picture of the man from many different instances and viewpoints. This book, because of its clear depiction of Truman’s character, makes the reader feel connected to Truman in a way that a biography perhaps does not.

A Customer

The author captures the essence of the man.  A must read for anybody fed up with superficial politicans.

Brysonmacdonald “caperbayboy” (Charlottetown PEI)

So, under “Children” you can find, “I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and advise them to do it.” Under “Politics,” “I wonder how far Moses would have gone if he’d taken a poll in Egypt?” And on his own presidency, to Adlai Stevenson, “If a knucklehead like me can be president and not do too badly, think what a really educated smart guy like you could do in the job.”

Washington: “If you want a friend in Washington, buy a dog.”

Politics: “I wonder how far Moses would have gone if he’d taken a poll in Egypt.”

Economics: “It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose your own.”

Ralph Keyes notes in his book Timelock: How Life Got So Hectic and What You Can Do About It … that labour savors enable us to to take less time doing a given task, so we do more tasks because of this saved time.  Thus, as more is done, we want to cut down on the time to do these additional tasks, so more efficient labour savers save the time, thus enabling us to do more stuff.  Keyes points out that the more we try to control time, the more time controls us.

It seems that noise, intensity, and ‘pump-it-up’-ness is on the rise.  In conjunction with time compression, this can be a nightmare.  See Ralph Keyes’s book Timelock for a good description of this.

Otoh [on the other hand], people like me somehow gravitate to busy schedules and trying to maximize experience within a time frame, so it does work both ways. Ralph Keyes’s SUPERB  book called Timelock: How Life Got So Hectic and What You Can Do About It describes it like this: we live in a time-tense society, so that people who are already predisposed to a fast-paced, high-stress, and long-hours type of lifestyle are going to find these traits magnified by cultural influences.  He recommends scheduling time out, to take a break, and to slot in time during the day for “pauses.”

Again, this stuff is discussed in detail in Ralph Keyes’s book Timelock, and I highly recommend it for a good read.

Arthur K. Weathers, Jr., DDS, editor

M.G. Lord

Linda Wright Moore

In ‘Euphemania,’ Ralph Keyes looks at euphemisms — how they came to be and why we use them. His earlier book looked at vintage phrases.

By Lori Kozlowski Los Angeles Times

January 27, 2011

It’s the way that we talk that fascinates Ralph Keyes. The words we choose to express the hurtful, the bawdy and what we perceive as shameful are of particular interest — because those are the subjects society feels the need to cover up.

We switch from “sex” to “sleeping together;” from “dead” to “pushing up daisies;” even “chicken breast” became “white meat” after Winston Churchill was once scolded for using it at a dinner party.

The follow-up to Keyes’ first effort on linguistics — “I Love It When You Talk Retro,” which examined vintage phrases like “drop a dime” and “double whammy” — “Euphemania” takes his passion for the oddities of language a bit further. He examines all of those replacement phrases and asks why we made the changes in the first place.

“Euphemisms,” he writes, “have a bright side and a dark side.” They are both our way of avoiding touchy topics that should be confronted and an effort to civilize everyday discourse. We have a tendency to give things a positive spin. Making things more rosy is, perhaps, best demonstrated by the term “life insurance,” which is actually death insurance.

There are various reasons for our gentle brushing over of the cold, hard truth, Keyes says. Some are rooted in our comfort level with sensitive topics, our sense of privacy, the need for creativity with words subject to censorship; euphemisms can also be markers of social class.

While we sweep up sex, politics, affairs, murder and other forms of mayhem into catchy, sometimes memorable phrases that give our listeners the idea of what we are trying to say without our saying it directly, the author asks: Are we a society that can’t utter some things at all? He also questions whether using more delicate phrases makes us nicer or somehow more genteel.

It’s an old practice: We’ve been using euphemisms and alternative phrases since the days of Cicero in Rome. In fact, the word “euphemism” comes from the name of the nurse of the ancient Greek Muses — Eupheme, whose name literally means “good speaking.”

As time passes, sometimes the kinder phrases we’ve created become less preferred; the “euphemism carousel” shows what was once old can become new again — or rather what was once bad can become good again (and vice versa). Keyes examines the idea of “blinding them with science” in that calling something by its formal scientific name somehow makes it more official and can sanitize the language in a clinical way. (Prophylactic, anyone?)

If a bit repetitive at times, “Euphemania” takes the reader through a whirlwind of historical moments and doesn’t hold back when explaining curse words, bodily functions and how, generally, we like to keep things nice and tidy when we talk to each other.

lori.kozlowski@latimes.com

Judson Jerome

Success in today’s business economy demands nonstop innovation. But fancy buzzwords, facile lip service, and simplistic formulas are not the answer. Only an entirely new mindset — a new attitude toward success and failure — can transform managers’ thinking, according to Richard Farson, author of the bestseller Management of the Absurd, and Ralph Keyes, author of the pathbreaking Chancing It: Why We Take Risks, in this provocative new work.

According to Farson and Keyes, the key to this new attitude lies in taking risks. In a rapidly changing economy, managers will confront at least as much failure as success. Does that mean they’ll have failed? Only by their grandfathers’ definition of failure. Both success and failure are steps toward achievement, say the authors. After all, Coca-Cola’s renaissance grew directly out of its New Coke debacle, and severe financial distress forced IBM to completely reinvent itself.

An interesting discussion on the need of failures. According to the authors, in a rapidly changing economy managers will confront at least as much failure as success. Does that mean they’ll have failed? Only by their grandfathers’ definition of failure.

Both success and failure are steps toward achievement, say the authors. After all, Coca-Cola’s renaissance grew directly out of its New Coke debacle, and severe financial distress forced IBM to completely reinvent itself.

Management by trial and error. All the senior marketers we invited to a marketing panel on innovation agreed that every successful innovation they had realized was based on many projects that never made it.

Isn’t it a shame that while we all know this is true, so few of us are prepared to accept credits for the successes as well as the “failures”?

- Michele Mees, The House of Marketing

One day she’s sending off résumés and demo tapes to television networks, the next she’s licking stamps and mailing out medical school applications.

Heather Basciano is keeping her options open.

Summer’s almost over and the 24-year-old Torontonian is making the most of her extended vacation, mostly catching up with friends and pounding the pavement – hoping to catch a break.

She used to be a “Lofter,” on camera 24/7 for the whole wired world to see, working as a host on the Internet reality-based television station U8TV.com.

The gig was supposed to last for a year, but ended abruptly in late June when the network pulled out, canceling the show U8TV: The Lofters and shutting down the U8TV.com Web site, leaving Basciano and her eight roommates without a job.

Now the bubbly blonde is still trying to find out where she belongs and what she wants to do, without a camera trailing her every move.

“Six months living like that and some old habits are hard to break,” she says in an interview.

“At first it was hard for me to not keep checking on my invisible microphone and (to not) keep looking around to the side to check if the camera was looking at me.”

Wiser from the experience, she admits to missing the novelty factor and semi-celebrity status that came with the job, but at the same time welcomes the return of her privacy.

“I am thrilled to be back to normal and get started on my real reality right now,” she says.

More than two months out of the loft, she’s still unemployed, but not too worried. She knows something will fall into place.

Instead of filling her days hosting shows about love, news, music, life and entertainment, she spends her time surfing the Internet, browsing classified ads and networking.

She’s also taking a couple of acting and improvisation classes to hone her skills.

And if it nothing pans out soon, she’s considering packing up and moving to Los Angeles this fall.

“I’m going to go and try and get an agent,” she says.

“I’m not expecting anything, but it will be an adventure and if something happens, great.”

Her adventurous outlook explains why she’s gushing about a book she just read, Whoever Makes The Most Mistakes Wins: The Paradox of Innovation, by Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes.

A business management book, the authors reason that while some failure is an inevitable part of the road to success, it actually may aid in the process of achieving it. They’re encouraging readers to take chances and learn from their mistakes.

“This book is totally the way I live,” she says. “I just picked the book up off the shelf and couldn’t put it down.”

A Queen’s University life science and biology graduate, Basciano is still a newcomer to the entertainment business.

After giving up a job as a pharmaceutical rep to take the job as a Lofter, her six-month stint was among her first experiences on camera.

“I took a huge chance. I threw away a really good career, a company car, a two-bedroom apartment and lots of money,” she says of her decision to become a Lofter.

“It was scary throwing that all away and doing something so ludicrous, but then all of a sudden I realized that it would open up so many opportunities that I wouldn’t have had before.”

Her mother thinks it was a huge mistake, but Basciano doesn’t see it that way. She’s realized she likes acting and hosting, and if it doesn’t work out, she still has her education to fall back on.

She’s also learned she has strong opinions and 24 years of experiences to share with others.

As a Lofter, Basciano never dreamed how powerful her voice would become as a tool to help others.

“People would ask me advice about everything, ranging from what they should do about their husband cheating, to how do they subtly ask for a raise at work, to detailed disparities of depression and confidence issues,” she says.

Viewers found comfort in the fact that Basciano has her own quirks and problems, which she never shied away from sharing. Of all the shows she hosted, she received the most feedback from a series recounting her experience being raped as a teenager.

After those shows aired, women started sending her e-mails detailing their personal stories and commending her for her bravery. The e-mails never stopped coming. Basciano guesses in six months she received about 7,000, each one of which she responded to.

Sitting in her new bedroom earlier this summer, staring at the walls of the uptown apartment she now shares with her two roommates, she says she misses the type of interaction she had with viewers and the opportunity to help others.

She’s sad that U8TV is over, but proud for taking such a big chance.

“I figure if you have the opportunity to do something in your life that you’ll probably never do again, then just do it … This was my one year to push the envelope and really explore my creative side.”

Now she’s looking to the future, gearing up to pounce on whatever opportunities cross her path.

They say it is the paradox of innovation: That in order to succeed, we must learn to fail. Think of all the great inventions that came from mistakes, all the great products that were developed in pursuit of something else… But if failure is such a good thing, why are compensation and performance evaluation so geared against it? We’ll pick up some new ideas in Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins, all this week on Business Prescriptions….

Those who want to have a better understanding of what motivates bosses, employees and peers should read Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins, a new book by Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes.  This small gem, published by Simon & Schuster’s Free Press division, is packed with easily understood, interesting and useful philosophy.

This is one of the most thought-provoking management books to come out in recent years.  As its subtitle, “The Paradox of Innovation,” suggests, much of the volume is devoted to innovation successes and failures, but its management suggestions go far beyond that.

“In personal and professional lives alike, neither success nor failure is what it seems to be,” the authors point out.  “That is the book’s basic message.  Success and failure can be hard to tell apart; one leads to the other and both have value.  That conclusion has led to its most counter-intuitive suggestion for leaders: Treat success and failure similarly, not with rewards or sanction, but personal engagement.  We have tried to show how many more management approaches become possible once conventional notions of success and failure are discarded.

“A both/and rather than either/or approach makes it easier to encourage inventiveness, support mavericks, do simultaneous planning, and destroy apparently successful businesses to make way for new ones that might fail – or win big.  At the heart of this posture is greater acceptance of failure as a necessary part of innovation.  This acceptance produces work environments that are genuinely risk-friendly, which is to say, failure-tolerant.  Even though fear of failure cannot be eradicated from such environments, it can be managed, even put to work as a source of energy and focus.  Those who are passionately engaged in a task they care about are the ones most likely to achieve success – paradoxically by minimizing thoughts of succeeding, or failing.”

There are so many other good ideas in this book that it is hard to summarize them, but here are a few:

·        In the midst of adversity, we are stronger than we think.  Human beings grow most from situations they try hardest to avoid.

·        Mistakes come from doing, but so does success.  We’re playing it too safe if we don’t fail occasionally.  Effective achievers focus on the task at hand and don’t let the possibility of failure break their concentration.

·        A reluctance to try something new is worse than trying something new that fails.  Generally accepted wisdom is what usually gets us in the most trouble.

·        Progress can be made only when failure is risked.  Failure and setbacks are often learning experiences, a step on the road to success.  Failure is not a disgrace; we should ask ourselves what we learned and them, “Where do we go from here?”

·        Success, which often results in the loss of focus and daring, is at least as hazardous as failure.  Complacency actually costs more than “costly failures.”

·        A company’s inability to move beyond its current success is more often due to lack of vision than lack of opportunity.  Preparing for the future sometimes requires a company to renounce its past.  Success is a moving target; what worked yesterday won’t necessarily work tomorrow.

·        Employees can’t be told to be innovative; corporate culture must be changed to encourage it.  Intolerance of errors is the Achilles’ heel of overly mature organizations.

I recommend this book.

Before automobile mogul Henry Ford struck gold in the auto industry, he failed twice in previous ventures.

The late chief executive officer of Coca Cola, Roberto Goizueta, presided over one of the greatest blunders in business history when he replaced traditional Coca Cola with a sweeter version, new Coca Cola, an saw his decision summarily rejected by consumers.  But learning from his mistakes, Goizueta went on to build a more prosperous company centered around Coca Cola as a brand, not as a product that sold on the basis of taste.

Those are just two just examples of tremendously successful businessmen who fell flat on their faces.  So were they failures and then successes  Or were their successes a direct outgrowth of their failures?  And what, really, is failure, a shameful episode that marks one as a loser forever or as a risk-taker willing to tolerate setbacks as the cost of great achievement?

“The fastest way to succeed is to double your failure rate,” said former IBM Chairman Thomas Watson Sr., who used that formula to build a hugely successful company.

A success himself, Champaign [Illinois] native and author Ralph Keyes has been thinking a lot about failure and its virtues.  Now he and co-author Richard Farson have published a book on the subject, Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins: The Paradox of Innovation, that examines the ups and downs of achievers, the danger of early success, complacency in the face of continued success and the advantages of risking failure.

“It’s really an inquiry.  What does success mean?  What does failure mean?  We write about many instances in which early failure led to later success,” he said …  Keyes is hoping that his latest work, his 11th book, will prove to be popular with more than just the “managers and leaders of all types” who have a specific interest in subjects like this.

“Obviously, the primary market is market managers,” Keyes said.  “But we tried to address broader issues.”

Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes

At the moment, investors and politicians are trying to put out the firestorm of corporate crimes that came to light after the Enron collapse.

They are insisting not only on intensive investigations and accounting reforms but punishment of the wrongdoers. In response, the business community has become nervous and fearful. This may turn out to be more damaging than the scandalous behavior itself.

Caution and accountability are replacing the expansiveness that once characterized American business. In the long run, this could be the most destructive consequence of book-cooking by the likes of Enron and WorldCom.

Long before news of corporate scandals broke, Americans were already on an accountability binge. Especially in our schools, but also in other institutions, we have been demanding tests and standards and answerability. The stunning misbehavior of the darlings of our investing public has only intensified that attitude.

As Ambrose Bierce noted almost a century ago, accountability is “the mother of caution.” In a climate of fear, we tend to insist more and more on tests and measures. In the process we become increasingly risk-averse.

Taking risks, however, is precisely what is needed now, more than ever.

Risk is the only avenue to innovation. And the demand for innovation in the current fast-paced, globalized and technologized economy is constant. We need continual innovation in both product and process.

Instead, we are seeing a pulling back, a move toward tightening up, toward making sure no mistakes are made.

Today’s most popular management fad is a quality-control approach known as “six sigma,” a term borrowed from statistics that means that the work done by our business and government institutions must be as close to perfect as possible. No mistakes.

This impulse to seek perfection takes us in the wrong direction, robbing us of what is perhaps our most important national strength: the ability to innovate. Other countries may occasionally have taken markets away from us, but there were always more where those markets came from because we had the power to innovate by taking chances and, in the process, to create new markets.

Mistakes and failure are the inevitable consequences of taking risks. One measure of genuine risk-taking is the amount of failure generated. That’s why IBM’s Thomas Watson Sr. said, “If you want to increase the probability of success, double your failure rate.”

The great innovators from Thomas Edison down to the contemporary entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley have operated on the same principle. They understand that failure and success are intimately connected, interdependent, sometimes indistinguishable. One has always led to the other.

Microsoft’s Bill Gates was recently depicted in Fortune magazine as a risk-taker whose success grew from the realization that, in the words of a colleague, “you have to try everything, because the real secret of innovation is to fail fast.”

To allow the current revelations of disgraceful corporate behavior to make us hunker down in a mode of caution could cause us to lose our edge in the highly competitive global economy.

Mike Harden

Ralph Keyes of Yellow Springs, Ohio has co-written the perfect gift for someone who has been fired, laid off or upbraided for concocting a bold new project that tanked. Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins: The Paradox of Innovation (Free Press, $22) is an anthem to lead balloons, a paean to flops.

“The fastest way to succeed is to double your failure rate,” said Keyes, quoting Thomas Watson Sr. of IBM.

The writer — who began work on the book three years ago with Richard Farson, author of Management of the Absurd — set out to study how companies deal with innovations that falter.

“3M has a strong failure-tolerant culture,” he noted. “They encourage their people not to be defensive about their failures.”

More than one presumed failure at 3M later turned out to be a success,

Keyes said. “This guy at 3M was trying to develop a really strong adhesive. He came up with a very wimpy adhesive. Then he discovered that, although it was a weak adhesive, it would re-adhere.”

Unsure of what to do, the researcher took the result to a free-for-all brainstorming session called Tech Forum.

A 3M staff member seeking a non-slip, removable marker for a church hymnal thought the adhesive perfect.

Post-it notes were thus created.

Similarly, Scotchgard was developed at 3M after a researcher spilled an experimental fluid on her shoe: The water she used to try to clean up the spill simply beaded.

“So-called accidents,” Keyes said, “have been wholly or partly responsible for products such as Gore-Tex, nylon, Teflon, Silly Putty, penicillin, shatterproof glass and the microwave oven.”

Such inventions evolve because of companies that are willing to make mistakes.

The fear of failure, Keyes suggested, often leads to failure.

“Do you remember Railway Express?” he asked. “If they had had the vision to see the future of air express, they would today be FedEx.

Polaroid, which sought bankruptcy protection in 2001, “did wonderful with instant photography, but they should have looked ahead at digital photography. There is a real danger in relying on what succeeded in the past to build your future.”

The issue isn’t just how companies handle failure but how individuals do, too.

“Country singer Joe Diffie said that the best year of his life was the one in which he lost his job at a foundry, got divorced, totaled his pickup and was audited by the IRS,” Keyes writes.

“With so little to lose, Diffie left Oklahoma for Nashville” — and launched a career in music.

What’s important to understand, Keyes said, is the relativity of both failure and success.

Borrowing from Kipling, he pointed out that triumph and disaster should be approached as impostors.

“In 1929, the year Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel; Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms; and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury were published, novelist Julia M. Peterkin won the Pulitzer for her now-long-forgotten novel Scarlet Sister Mary.

“Daring leads to loss more often than gain.”

Unfortunately, in tough economic times, daring is sometimes replaced by caution and wariness.

The willingness to take risks goes out the window.

Failure is part of the game, said Keyes, quoting NBA star Michael Jordan:

“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over again in my life.

“And that is why I succeed.”

by Robin Grugal

Inspiration for great ideas is all around us – not hidden in shadowy recesses, but right there in plain sight. All it requires is for us to see the obvious with fresh eyes. Easier said than done? Sure, it’s in our nature to overlook what we take for granted. But it’s worth making a conscious effort to be more observant in our everyday lives. Amazingly enough, billions of tea drinkers observed the force of steam escaping from water boiling in a kettle before James Watt realized that this vapor could be converted into energy. And many scientists and researchers knew bacteria couldn’t live around the penicillium mold, but it took Alexander Fleming to recognize that the mold killed bacteria and could potentially be used to fight infection, giving birth to the field of antibiotics. The Eyes Of Children “Those who see what’s obvious aren’t necessarily brighter than others. They’re just more likely to observe that the emperor is naked. Like children, they see what’s actually there. Their perceptions are less clouded by belief systems, taboos, habits of thought,” said authors Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes of Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins. Consider the case of Swiss engineer George de Mestral, the father of Velcro. He found an alternative to the zipper by observing nature. His story began one night in 1948, when he and his wife were about to go to dinner and she became frustrated by a stubborn zipper on her dress. She wondered if there might be another way to secure fabrics. A few weeks later, de Mestral took his dog for a walk through the forest. On his return, he noticed burrs on the dog’s coat and thought he would look at one under a microscope. The surface consisted of tiny hooks, and he noticed that they stuck to tiny loops in his clothing. He wondered if the principle of tiny hooks and loops could be made into a product.  It took him eight years to devise a cheap and simple way to make large quantities of the fasteners, making one strip soft and fuzzy (loops) and the other with tiny hooks. He finally succeeded and made millions of dollars in royalties. Oddly enough, nobody before de Mestral thought about the adhesive qualities of those annoying little burrs. And it wasn’t for a lack of analysis. The herb that produces these burrs, called burdock, had long been valued for its medicinal properties, said Steven Strauss in “The Big Idea.” Then there’s the case of Ermal Fraze, the inventor of the first self-contained, ring-pull drink opener. Back in 1959, he was at a picnic and wanted to open his drink can, but couldn’t find a can opener with a triangular pointed edge. So he used a car bumper to get it open. The result was a lot of foam and frustration. Fraze, a toolmaker, went down to his workshop one night and tinkered until he came up with the basic principles of the ring-pull can. The idea became the standard for soda and beer cans for nearly two decades. The push-in and fold-back version replaced it in 1977.

Mike Leonard

You’ve completed your course work, snatched up your diplomas and hit up all of your parents’ friends for graduation gifts.

You’ve also probably heard more advice and inspirational words than you can stomach, although if someone sidled up to you and said, knowingly, “plastics,” that was worth a belly laugh, even if you didn’t get the reference from the 1967 film The Graduate.

Now, if you really want to know something that will help you as you get on with your lives and your careers, pay heed to what Ralph Keyes has to say: “Now get out there and fail!”

Keyes and co-author Richard Farson recently published a book titled Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins: The Paradox of Innovation. In it, they argue quite persuasively that failure not only is an unavoidable fact of life but, probably, the engine that drives success.

“If we’re trying to do anything with this book, it’s to destigmatize failure and to suggest that the worst way to achieve success is to pursue success and avoid failure,” Keyes said last week from his Yellow Springs, Ohio, home.

“That’s a very hard message to sell in this society because we’re so success-oriented,” the eclectic author explained. “It seems like every other book you see has success in its title. Dress for Success. Ten Ways to Success.”

The authors cite dozens of examples of failures that led to successes and quote a variety of successful people who also believe in the failure-breeds-success model. One of the most ridiculed business initiatives in recent times was the Coca-Cola Co.’s decision to change its formula to create New Coke, for example.

Yes, New Coke was an extraordinary flop. But, the authors argue, the failure taught the company that its value was in its brand, not its formula. Coke rebounded to increase its market share, wiser for the lessons learned in failure.

A Yale student named Fred Smith earned a C — not exactly a failure but close in the Ivy League culture — for a paper proposing an overnight delivery service. Smith’s professor dismissed his thesis as implausible. Smith took his idea forward after college anyway and created a company called Federal Express.

The great inventor Charles Kettering once said, “Failing is one of the greatest arts in the world. One fails toward success.” Henry Ford called failure “the opportunity to begin again, more intelligently.” And the man who made IBM the dominant force in the computer world for many years, Thomas Watson Sr., said, “The fastest way to succeed is to double your failure rate.”

“Among the startup people in Silicon Valley, there is almost a failure chic,” Keyes pointed out. “One guy will say, “I’ve gone belly-up twice and the next guy will say, ‘Well, I’ve gone bankrupt six times.’”

The point is that big or innovative ideas would never get off the ground if people weren’t afraid to fail. “It’s one reason our economy is so vibrant compared to older economies such as those in Europe,” Keyes said. “To take a chance and fail is one of the worst things that can happen to you in those systems.”

Indeed, when Congress tightened up bankruptcy laws at the urging of the Bush administration last year, many economists argued that the measures would only discourage the kind of cutting-edge innovation that made the United States an economic giant in the first place.

Keyes says the fear of failure paradigm also applies in the sports world. “Look at the Winter Olympics. Michelle Kwan was clearly going for the gold and it made her tense and somewhat rigid,” Keyes said. “Sarah Hughes wasn’t thought to have a chance for the gold and she skated wonderfully because she wasn’t carrying the fear of failure that hampered Kwan.”

Keyes believes that the FBI’s recent problems can be attributed in part to an institutional culture that held on to structures and methods that had been successful in the past. “They enjoyed so much success catching bank robbers and the like that they saw no reason to restructure themselves to better handle intelligence and the challenges of the modern world,” he said.

All of this also applies to recent graduates of high school or college, Keyes said. “I think schools have a very bad success-failure model. You succeed or fail. You got a good grade or a bad grade. And if you got a bad grade, you’re a failure.

“What we’re trying to propose is the question, ‘Is the distinction between success and failure that clear?’ It isn’t in real life. We can all look back at our own lives and see times that seemed like setbacks to us but actually pushed us in a new direction that led to some success.”

As has often been pointed out, Microsoft’s Bill Gates was a Harvard drop-out. And David Letterman endowed a scholarship at his alma mater, Ball State, specifying that it should go to reward creativity and not grade point average.

“Actually,” Keyes said, “it’s fairly surprising to see how often the best students in high school or college do not go on to become the most accomplished citizens later in life.”

From the book Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes

Wins, by Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes

Marilyn’s “Must” Reads (Machlowitz Consultants, Inc.)

Stern & Associates (HR Consulting)

Contrarian food for thought.

Trying to meet a father’s expectations.

Learning not to touch one’s father affectionately, replacing hugs and kisses with manly handshakes.

Competing with one’s father, especially in sports.

Trying to accomplish what one’s father couldn’t, either at his behest or with his resistance.

Realizing gradually the terrible price fathers pay to be “good providers.”

…if the writers in Keyes’s collection are any indication, even those fathers who are intimately involved in their children’s lives are facing their own struggle — trying to be there in a way their own fathers might not have been, trying to become the role models they might have missed.

E. Stephens, The Examined Life

Writing for The New Republic Online Gregg Easterbrook finds that “whether something is believed has become more important than whether it’s true.” As evidence, Easterbrook introduces us to The Post-Truth Era, a new book by Ralph Keyes. In an article (requires registration) that touches on the recent presidential debates, LBJ, Jesse Ventura, Jacques Derrida, and Werner Heisnberg, Easterbrook grapples with the new American appetite for lies.

—Kenneth Tanner, Touchstone magazine

Hmmmm. Interesting notion. Certainly seems plausible. Of course, being a walking paragon of virtue, I don’t do any such thing. But now that I know what the rest of you are up to, I’ll be on my guard…

The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life, Ralph Keyes (Still on my list, however, I was able to obtain a copy of the book, so now I do not have to forage through my local library.)

thedp.blogspot.com/

Gregg Easterbrook, Tuesday Morning Quarterback on NFL.Com

Sean Buchanan

This is it for me, my last act of participation at Kent State. There’s a lot I’ll miss. There’s also some relief, but no regrets. I’ve found a job, gotten engaged to the love of my life and acquired some massive student loans.

I do hope though that I’ve learned enough to warrant an advice column. Since columns are only 550 words, I just might be able to pull it off.

Major in what you love, not what you think will get you a job. I’ve known I would major in philosophy and English since I was in junior high, and that might be the only thing I was right about then. I’m not saying, “Don’t major in the career-focused areas,” but only do so if you know you want to be an accountant.

Subscribe to a magazine. People who don’t keep up on new developments get boring. Unless you’d like to damn yourself to a life of always talking about you, pick up a magazine about anything you’d like, be it Wire, Harper’s, Bass Weekly or Playboy.

Be as involved as you’d like. One of the greatest things about a large campus like Kent State is that no matter how much time you have or what you’d like to do, there’s a group to participate in. If you’re a soulless resume builder, you can run for Undergraduate Student Senate, or if you like paddling freshman — in a completely heterosexual way of course — you can go greek.

Most importantly, our generation is in a position to understand the world in a new way. According to Ralph Keyes, we’re living in a post-truth era, but that’s not where we need to be. Our generation can take the lessons learned from the French theoreticians of the ’70s and use the history they’ve torn apart to construct a much more honest telling.

We have a panoply of values and beliefs to examine, but just stopping there and proclaiming them all equally valuable is pointless. Bruno Latour laid out a project for criticism that is akin to the project of our generation: using criticism to add to the knowledge in the world rather than taking it away. For example, when we teach American history, we tend to fall into the trap of evaluating the founding fathers as heroes or just a new brand of slave holders. But we can’t just settle for the apple pie or the rotten apples. We need to delve and continue to delve, tossing out the bad and refining the merely OK to get the best possible knowledge.

We owe a fundamental debt to honesty as a value. There’s no question we’ve lost that value in many ways. Cultural relativism certainly hasn’t helped. But by keeping an open mind, yet constantly critical and discerning, we can be honest without cruelty.

There are lazy thinkers out there who will use this for cheap relativism, like the white males who consider themselves a victimized minority or those who think moral values justify their hatred. But building a just world and a just future depends on them losing.

And remember, the doors in the Student Center always open on the side of the KSU seal. Don’t push the wrong side of the door …

Susan DeBow

I assume part of the purpose for the debates by the presidential and vice-presidential candidates is to give voters clarity as to the positions of the candidates. This is a worthy idea. Unfortunately for me, all it is doing is making me dread Nov. 2.

After seeing and hearing the candidates discuss what they believe, all I can say is, I’m having a hard time believing anyone.

As a person trying to be a good citizen, I feel it is my obligation to vote. And I will. But I can’t begin to tell you the nauseous feeling I get when I think of casting my vote for either the Bush/Cheney or Kerry/Edwards ticket. And it galls me that while I can go to the store and choose from 125 kinds of salad dressings, when I go to cast my ballot for a decision decidedly more important than ranch or blue cheese I am forced to select from only two parties. Instead of feeling like I am supporting the system, I feel as though I’m being held a prisoner to it.

How in the world can a voter be expected to choose a president in an election where “the truth” is only a manipulation used to further an agenda? The candidates accuse each another of lying. They throw numbers and supposed “facts” around that none of us can believe.

Now, a fact seems to be anything anyone believes to be true, a conclusion that has been brought into being by manipulating evidence, a piece of information that often is taken out of context and thrown around with an air of moral supremacy and indignation, only to be countered by a retaliatory “fact” that has been has been thrown together to trump the opponent’s fact.

The debate is mud wrestling without the entertainment value of having real mud. And I am up to my armpits in muck, trying to wade through the half-truths, spin and crocheted facts.

Who do I vote for when I believe that Iraq has been mishandled by the current administration? How do I get rid of the nagging thought that there was a personal agenda this administration had when it abruptly turned from Afghanistan to Iraq? Is what I feel more truthful than what I’m being told? How do I vote for a candidate who I believe doesn’t really have a total understanding of the way the world operates these days? And who has, no matter what he has said in the debates, changed his stance on the war more times than Joan Rivers has changed faces — yet won’t admit it?

Who do I vote for when I believe that after 9-11 a golden opportunity was cast aside by the incumbent to bring this country together by having us work together to become energy self-sufficient, to actually do some soul-searching as to who we are as a country and as individuals, to make sure that we are building a better America?

Yet how do I vote for a candidate who says he will be tough on terrorists, when he valued his job on the Senate Intelligence Committee so little that he missed 76 percent of the meetings during his time on the committee from 1993-2000? How do I believe a man who has belittled the leader of Iraq so badly?

How do I choose between two candidates, neither of whom I believe understands my belief that the educational system in this country needs to be revamped and the success of our children’s education begins with parent accountability? One candidate says that our education system is better and one says it is worse?

How am I supposed to figure out who to vote for when it comes to jobs and the economy when the candidates don’t compare apples with apples? One candidate says that our economy is a mess. The other says it is rosy, robust and growing. How is a voter supposed to know who is telling the truth?

Perhaps why I’m having such a difficult time is that for the first time in my voting life, we’re living in what author Ralph Keyes calls a “post-truth era,” where, unfortunately, fact and fiction, truth and lies and spin are designed to capture us in a web.

Growing up we had a saying, “Liar, liar pants on fire.”

So I guess, as a voter, I guess I’ll end up casting my vote for the candidate whose pants don’t go up in flames.

Robin Summerfield

He traveled a lot for business. Curious thing, though — his bags never had any airline tags. He told his wife of 30 years that he ripped them off at the airport and threw them away before coming home.

“Nobody does that,” says private investigator Ali Wirsche, who discovered the man was living a secret life with another woman in Calgary. “The double life is very confusing,” says Wirsche. “They tell so many lies they can’t remember their lies anymore.” Are we lying more these days or does it just seem that way? And does it really matter either way?

Spouses cheat, job seekers pad their resumes, Internet daters inflate their profiles, shoppers taste grapes in the grocery store and flatterers say, “Gee, that shirt looks really good on you.” Those lies can range from harmless fibs to whoppers that destroy marriages, take down corporations, empty retirement funds or put Martha in the big house.

In a 10-minute conversation, 60 per cent of people will tell an average of three lies or untruths, U.S. psychology researcher Robert Feldman found.

“It’s hard not to feel there’s a lot of lying going on,” says author Ralph Keyes, whose book The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life (St. Martin’s Press) hits shelves this October.

Keyes began his search for the truth behind lying about three years ago; he felt the increase of electronic media such as the Internet, e-mail and 24-hour cable, was leading to a flood of deception.

“What we may think of as an epidemic of lies may actually be an epidemic of the discovery of old lies,” Keyes says. “Lies are like cockroaches. You see one, you’re bound to see more.”

Instead of lying, we shave the truth, we spin, we contextualize, we’re lenient with honesty, we’re economical with the truth or we just exercise bad judgment, says Keyes, rattling off his favourite list of euphemisms for lying.

So why are we fudging the truth so freely?

Modern life with its increased mobility, anonymity and inherent loss of community is at the root, Keyes surmises. The Internet is also to blame, but while the anonymity of e- mail and the Web encourages consequence-free dishonesty, that same modern tool can out liars much easier, Keyes says from his base in Yellow Springs, Ohio, near Dayton.

One Google search and a past whopper can easily be revealed. But that still doesn’t deter people because “recreational lying” — weaving a tale and getting away with it — can be “a lot more entertaining than telling the truth,” says Keyes. “The problem today is not that we tell lies, it is that we tell lies promiscuously and without thinking about it,” he says. “There’s a casualness of today’s lies. Deception is a way of life.”

That way of life can also bring rewards, as evinced in popular culture. New York Times reporter Jayson Blair was fired for faking stories from his apartment in Brooklyn. The lies initially made him a star in a highly competitive environment; after he was exposed, his story earned him a juicy book deal, although Burning Down My Master’s House tanked in sales. He’s not the only writer recently caught fabricating stories: among them are The Boston Globe’s Patricia Smith, National Post’s Brad Evenson, USA Today’s Jack Kelley and the New Republic’s Stephen Glass, who turned his mendacious misadventures into a bestselling book and movie, The Fabulist. Even Alberta Premier Ralph Klein was accused of plagiarizing from the Internet for a university term paper earlier this year. He was cleared of any wrongdoing.

Publicly unearthing lies and outing the liars has become its own money-making industry. Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 is a two-hour-plus assault on George W. Bush’s administration and the path to war post-Sept. 11. The film — which systematically attacks the U.S. president’s personal motivations for the Iraq war, decision by decision — made $100 million US in its first six weeks of release in the States and won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. Former Saturday Night Live writer and performer, satirist and radio show host Al Franken’s latest book, Lies and the Lying Liars that Tell Them, takes on what he calls a “liberal media bias myth,” deconstructing right-wing arguments and attacks on Democrats. The book is a bestseller.

Lying is not just for the famous and the infamous. “Lying is extremely pervasive and it’s something we see a lot of in everyday conversation,” says Feldman, a psychology professor and researcher at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “And we’re not very good at determining when people are lying to us or not.” The expert on lying has discovered that liars will blink their eyes more, could break into a sweat, fidget, look around and break eye contact. Those same cues, however, are seen when people are nervous or anxious for a host of other reasons.

Feldman does clear up one misconception about liars. Both sexes lie about the same amount, but for different reasons, he discovered. Women will lie more often to spare feelings or protect others, while men lie to pump themselves up, Feldman says. His latest research looks at the effect and response of being lied to. Preliminary results have found the victim begins returning the lies to the victimizer after they discover the deception.

Without question lying, has consequences. Just ask Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. His Vietnam service record has been relentlessly attacked in the past few weeks by a group of veterans. While the claims have been discredited, damage has been done. A Los Angeles Times survey published Thursday shows Bush leading the presidential race, capturing 49 per cent of registered voters compared to Kerry’s 46 per cent, marking the first time the U.S. president has pulled ahead of his competitor this year, the newspaper reported.

In private life, people lie to protect others, spare feelings, inflate their self-worth, pursue their own self-interests and outright deceive for deception’s sake. The truth can be bent, but not broken. So when is lying OK — or is it ever? “It’s a question of morality. Society makes these judgments,” Feldman says.

Some lies are told for self-preservation, however misguided it may be. Athletes, such as the Greek Olympic track stars who made headlines last week, might lie about using performance-enhancing drugs. Former U.S. president Bill Clinton clung to power by claiming that he “did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” Even Martha Stewart, who has been convicted of lying about a stock trade to investigators at the Securities and Exchange Commission, still claims she’s done nothing wrong.

Others lie out of a need for self aggrandizement. Former Lethbridge alderman Dar Heatherington — who went missing on a political junket in Montana last year and was found days later walking in Las Vegas dazed and confused — was found guilty of making up her imaginary stalker. She will be sentenced in September.

“People use lying to justify promoting their own self interests,” says Calgary ethicist Sinclair MacRae. In business, Enron executives fudged finances. The company and its retirement fund imploded and thousands lost their jobs. In Canada, Calgary exploration company Bre-X told investors there was gold in them thar hills, and lots of it. There wasn’t. Investors lost their shirts as the stock price plummeted.

Lying is not one act, with clearly defined boundaries, MacRae says. It can range from posturing to deception to telling outright falsehoods to letting people draw false inferences from words or actions. “There’s nothing in the acts that make one better or worse than the other,” says the Mount Royal College professor. “Ultimately, it depends on the harm done.”

Some of the most damaging lies involve adultery, which is why Calgary P.I. Wirsche and her partner Marnie Milot are never short of clients. In the business for 10 years, the Calgarians have heard every lie. With so many falsehoods flying, Wirsche and Milot came up with a Top 20 Lies List. (The list will appear in their latest book, Sex, Lies and P.I.s, to be published in Spring 2005.)

Among the whoppers most commonly told:

- I found that hotel key on the sidewalk and I haven’t had time to return it.

- I bought that contraceptive foam by mistake.

- That condom wrapper in my car blew in the open window.

- It must have dropped out of the mechanic’s pocket.

- That blond hair must be the mechanic’s.

“Those poor mechanics,” Wirsche says.

Even with all the lying going on around her, the investigator warns would-be cheaters against embarking on relationships built on lies. “You should watch your back, because we could be watching you.”

Mike Leonard

Reggie Fowler, the man attempting to buy the Minnesota Vikings, had enough lies on his resume to make a con artist blush, but his bid to become an NFL owner remains on track.

The prevailing attitude seems to be, so what if he put a generous amount of frosting on that cake? Everybody does it.

When University of Colorado scholar Ward Churchill came under fire for saying that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on U.S. civilian targets were basically justified, research revealed a number of distortions and exaggerations in his scholarship and background – including the fact he isn’t a Native American, as he’d always suggested, but an honorary one.

Churchill seemed neither shamed nor repentant when he appeared last week on HBO’s popular “Real Time with Bill Maher.” Quite the opposite, in fact.

Ralph Keyes of Yellow Springs, Ohio, refers to both situations as merely the most recent examples of the greater thesis he takes on in his newest book, The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life.

“I’ve been intrigued for at least the last couple of decades with the number of people I call imposeurs – people pretending to be something more than they are,” the author said in a phone interview last week.

“I love Fowler’s response to all of this: ‘I realize there is some confusion surrounding my background.’ If that’s not post-truthfulness, what is?”

Keyes examines everything from the religious underpinnings to the morality of truthfulness to the various examples of distortions and misrepresentations of the truth in everyday life and concludes, “There’s a whole lot of lyin’ going on.”

“Actually, I was kind of surprised when I went back and read early theology on this issue. There’s always an out in any body of ethics, outside of Immanuel Kant and St. Augustine, who took a more extreme view. But the idea of all religions saying that all lying is wrong is simply untrue. There are always outs.”

There are big lies and little lies, of course. And the way we accept the little lies could be one reason that people seem to have an increasingly difficult time figuring out where various shades of dishonesty fit on the spectrum.

Little lies that most of us tell regularly include voice-mail messages that say we’re not in when we are. Saying, “I’m fine” when that isn’t really the case. Making up excuses instead of leveling with people.

Fowler, the prospective NFL owner, said he’d played for the Cincinnati Bengals and Calgary Stampeders when, in fact, he’d only attended training camps. He said he graduated from the University of Wyoming in business when he actually majored in social work.

“I was talking to a guy only recently who said he went to college with his best friend from childhood and they roomed together for two weeks before they decided it wasn’t going to work out,” Keyes said. “They were like a truth squad for each other, and whenever one of them started exaggerating to impress people, the other guy would call him on it. They decided that was no fun. It was easier to hang out with people who didn’t grow up with you so you would be free to embellish.”

Politicians prevaricate so much it makes it difficult for people to even know where to draw the line on the difference between lying and playing politics. Bill Clinton tried to dance around participation in an extramarital sexual affair by narrowly, and most would agree, disingenuously, defining the meaning of the word “sex.” George W. Bush distorts the implications of his programs and policies by giving them positive-sounding names that no one could quibble with, if true. And Ronald Reagan sometimes described his movie roles as experiences he’d actually had, often putting him in places he never visited.

“I think lying is definitely a bipartisan activity,” Keyes said. “But in general, Democrats seem more prone to tell fibs about themselves, like Clinton and Gore did, and Republicans are more likely to use deception on policy issues and what they’re really up to, like why we invaded Iraq, or whether the clear skies or healthy forests initiatives will deliver what they say they will or whether they’re just programs that further the interests of energy companies and logging interests.”

Keyes said, especially with respect to the personal lying and embellishments that most people engage in, it would seem our mobile society plays a role. Now that most of us don’t grow up in one community and stay there, we don’t have the same sense that we’ll get caught when we make our stories a little more interesting.

Religion, even with its exceptions for acceptable lies, seems to have been replaced with a therapeutic model, Keyes theorized. “If someone tells a lie, we say he’s in denial. Therapists will say it’s not my job to expose lies in my patients. My job is to find out how my patient really feels about things.”

The Post Truth Era is a fascinating book because Keyes wrote it with a solid journalistic approach. From the little lies he discusses to the big ones, there is no denying that what he writes is accurate.

What it all means is the big question.

“I’m not trying to be up on a pulpit and say shame on you liars. I’m a sinner. I’m not always as truthful as I wish I was,” he said.

“More than anything, I’m just trying to engage the public in a debate we ought to have. Have we slipped into being dishonest on too casual a basis? And when people do lie, does it bother anyone that there often are no sanctions whatsoever as a consequence?”

Jim Dey

In his memoir, Locked in the Cabinet, Robert Reich, a former U.S. Secretary of Labor, cast himself as the hero in confrontations with members of Congress during public hears on Capitol Hill.  After a magazine reporter checked videotapes and transcripts of the hearings and found the heated battles that Reich had described never happened, Reich defended his misrepresentations by maintaining that “I was absolutely true to my memory.”

Fired from The New York Times for fabricating facts and events in news stories, reporter Jayson Blair defended his falsehoods as justified because of his grievances against the newspaper.  He was rewarded with a six-figure contract to write a book on his misadventures at the Times.

Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchu became a hero among certain segments of the academic community when she wrote an autobiography about growing up under oppression in Guatemala.  But when Menchu later conceded that major portions of her book were fabricated, her defenders in academia said they would continue to make it required reading for their students because her story represented a larger truth.

“Whether her book is true or not, I don’t care,” said a professor at Wellesley College.

Misrepresentations — lies to be more blunt — have long been a staple of life, whether in show business, politics, academia, journalism or routine interactions among people.  But what’s become increasingly common in recent years is the tolerance that society shows not only for admitted liars but acceptance of their falsehoods as not necessarily false.

At least, that’s the contention of author Ralph Keyes, a former Champaign resident whose latest book is titled The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life.  Noting continued episodes of deceit, Keyes said he has been struck by society’s reaction to liars and their lies.

“The main (point) is saying, ‘Maybe we’ve become too fib-friendly,’ he said.  “As long as there is no penalty for the transgression, we’ll continue to have a post-truth society.”

Keyes, of course, is not surprised that people from all walks of life say things that aren’t true.  Whether it’s to impress people, make a sale or get out of trouble, people have been telling lies since the beginning of time.

What’s changed, Keyes contends, is the willingness of certain segments of society to label falsehoods as either “spinning,” “poetic truth,” or “nearly true,” depending on how they feel about the individual’s political or social causes.

“We’re pretty clever at coming up with all these rationales.  But we’re really losing our grip on the difference between truth and lies, between honesty and dishonesty,” he said.

Keyes said the issue sometimes boils down to this: “My guy’s lie is understandable, but your guy’s lies are reprehensible.

People lie for a variety of reasons, sometimes just to impress others.

The noted historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joseph Ellis regaled his students at Mt. Holyoke College with his adventures as combat soldier, football hero and civil rights activist, none of which was true.  After Ellis’s falsehoods were revealed in the Boston Globe, Mt. Holyoke’s president defended Ellis’s misconduct until public criticism forced her to suspend Ellis from the faculty for a year.

Ellis ultimately paid a high price for his transgression, but that’s not always the case.

Fired from The Boston Globe for fabricating stories, columnist Mike Barnicle quickly landed work as a columnist elsewhere as well as a radio/TV commentator.  Had Barnicle had lesser stature than that of a well-known columnist, his journalistic career would have been over.  But influential personal friends helped the colorful Barnicle resurrect his career.

Politicians, not surprisingly, are among the worst liars, with offenders coming from the ranks of both Republicans and Democrats.  But any offense taken at their misrepresentations often is divided on partisan lines.

Keyes’s latest book is his 13th.  He has worked as a freelance writer since 1970, a perilous career path because of the irregularity of income.

“People ask what the secret is to being a freelance writer, and I say, ‘A wife with a steady job,’” he said.  “Freelance writing is a very odd and harrowing way to make a living.  I don’t recommend it, although I enjoy it.”

Now 59, Keyes grew up in Champaign-Urbana, the son of university professor Scott Keyes and Charlotte Keyes, a writer.  He graduated from Champaign High School in 1962 and went to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where he soon met the woman who became his wife. After living in various places across the United States, Keyes, his wife and two sons moved back to Yellow Springs in 1990.

Although he’s primarily an author of books, Keyes said he also supports himself by public speaking and teaching, mostly on topics about which he’s written books.

Keyes said his latest book has been well received, particularly in religious circles, even though the book is is not religious in nature.

“I think they see this as something that ties into messages (of honesty and morality) that they’re trying to convey,” he said.

Keyes said he has not seen much evidence that society is changing its tolerance for prominent people telling lies.  But he described the Internet as a tool that can and is being used to expose that kind of dishonesty, something he said might deter people from lying.

“It’s a great fact-checker,” he said.

Although he contemplated the project for years, Keyes said it actually took him about two years to research and write.  He’s now working on a couple of other projects that will keep him occupied for the foreseeable future.

Keyes said he is “looking at the big 6-0″ on Jan. 12, but has no thoughts of retirement.  After all, he said, writers write and if he retired “what would I do?”

Khalid Moss

Few TV viewers younger than 40 probably remember the quiz show To Tell the Truth, which premiered in 1956 and ran, off and on, until 1991.

To Tell the Truth was a model of progressive simplicity. Three contestants claimed to be the same person. Two were lying. Four celebrity panelists questioned the contestants, one by one, then voted for the contestant they believed to be the real person – the one telling the truth. If a shrewd impostor could sell a convincing lie and stump the celebrities, the contestants were rewarded with vigorous applause, generous cash prizes and a home version of the TV show.

In a sense, To Tell the Truth was the nation’s first reality show because the format eerily mimics the way truth has been devalued and lies uplifted in the era of high-definition TV. And just like the quiz show, you have to constantly be on the lookout for real-life impostors whose tools of the trade are smoke and mirrors.

In his latest book, The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life, (St. Martin’s Press $24.95) Yellow Springs author Ralph Keyes suggests that the spreading of lies, deceptions, fibs and falsehoods has become more infectious in American society than the flu virus. And, he warns, it’s going to take more than a shot of truth serum to fight off the effects of this creeping epidemic.

Whether its the Internet, parents, faith leaders or politicians, people are running untouched into the vortex of deceit because they are not being held accountable for their lies and untruths. In this, his eighth book, Keyes submits that people have become so callous and disconnected that lying has become inextricably wedged into the craw of the American experience.

A 1966 Antioch College grad who calls himself a “mom-andpop sociologist,” Keyes theorizes that in this volatile cultural mix where humans are displaced, confused and sorely lacking in a sense of community, we no longer feel compelled to be honest with each other.

“There are two basic reasons not to lie,” said Keyes between sips of bottled water in the living room of his smart Yellow Springs bungalow. “One is because it’s wrong. That’s the internal reason – your conscience. The second is that you might get caught. This could cause problems with the people you’re connected to in a tribe, village or a small community like this one. But since so few of us live in those kind of environments, you are left with conscience. I don’t believe conscience or ethics alone are strong enough to keep us from putting each other on.”

Statistics on lying are difficult to track, and harder to swallow. Studies based in part on information at the 2000 Census Web site and the Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests that most people lie once or twice a day and deceive more than 30 folks a week. (“You look great in that dress!” “I don’t do drugs.” “Sure, I love raw fish!”)

One hundred percent of dating couples surveyed lied to each other in a third of their interactions, and college students lie in 50 percent of conversations with their parents. According to the IRS, more than 10 million people lie on their tax forms and, more astonishingly, we are lied to more than 200 times each day.

Honesty and dishonesty, says Keyes, are practical and functional. There is no scientific evidence to support the theory that the human genome is programmed to tell the truth.

“We have no natural tendency to be truthful or to lie,” he explained. “Earliest societies were small, tightly knit groups where lying was considered dysfunctional. It would have been impossible to sustain trust within such a self-fulfilling group if people could not be truthful. Earliest ethics said you had to be honest to your own kind. But strangers were another ball of wax. All bets were off. Early ethics had nothing to do with strangers or people outside your immediate clan.

“It wasn’t until St. Augustine (born in 340 A.D.) and philosopher Emmanuel Kant that lying became ethically wrong. We think of Kant as having a pure ethic that said you should never lie because it’s wrong. But he was much more practical. If you read his reasons for saying you shouldn’t lie, it’s because, ‘Lying would make a modern society impossible.’ ”

Despite tragic lapses in truth and honesty, modern society has managed to muddle along due, in part, to its faith systems. The Ten Commandments don’t specify lying as a sin, but Exodus 20:16 says, “You should not bear false witness against your neighbor,” and in Revelation 21: 7-8, people who lie, “shall find themselves in the lake of fire which is the second death.”

Keyes observed that each religion has its own concept of truth.

“The basic approach in every religion is that honesty is the best policy. To be dishonest is to forsake the Lord,” Keyes said. “And yet each religion has exceptions that reflect that religion. Islam has certain exceptions that Muhammad laid out, Judaism has certain exceptions and Christianity has certain exceptions. The problem is when you get into the exceptions. Who decides what the exceptions are?

“I think we all tell lies, and it has nothing to do with our personal religious faith. But to the degree that we can minimize those occasions, to the degree that we can be thoughtful and mindful when we are about to tell a lie, that to me is the key.

“I conclude, in The Post Truth Era, that, more than a moral or spiritual revival, what we need in our country is a stronger emphasis on personal human connections. The more we feel tied to each other, the less likely we are to tell each other lies.”

Richard Louv

On Tuesday, at approximately 6:40 a.m., the Diebold optical scanner didn’t like what it tasted. The machine regurgitated the first ballot, and the second, and the third, and more after that.

“Maybe it’s actually a shredder,” one of my fellow poll workers said.

Using the registrar-provided mobile phone, I tried to call the registrar’s troubleshooter hotline. “Due to high volume, we cannot answer your call now,” a recorded voice answered. “Please try back again later.”

“They should have outsourced tech support,” said another poll worker.

“How do you know they didn’t?” someone asked.

With a little faith-based finesse and divine intervention, the scanner finally proved workable. The morning improved. So did our mood.

This was my first experience as a poll worker. A neighbor had nominated me. When I tried to wiggle out of the job, my wife suggested that I should practice what I preach. So at 6:30 a.m., I had slouched toward this corner house a few blocks from my house, its garage door open, where I have voted for a decade.

Ever wonder why most poll workers seem to be getting on in years? The reason is the job ages you. A veteran poll worker advised, “It’s a short day. The first 100 hours are the longest.”

These citizens pursued their duties with scrupulous efficiency, handling the ballots with the care a trucker might take with cases of nitroglycerin. We may no longer trust the election process, but don’t blame the poll workers.

They may be last honest folks standing. Or sitting.

In The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life, Ralph Keyes, a former San Diegan, argues deception has become the American way of life. We lie, he says, often with no real reason. According to one study, 28 percent of conversations among friends contained conscious lies; 77 percent among strangers.

“In the post-truth era, we don’t just have truth and lies but a third category of ambiguous statements that are not exactly the truth but fall just short of a lie,” he argues. “Enhanced truth, it might be called. Neo-truth. Soft truth. Faux truth. Truth lite.”

Sounds like the 2004 presidential campaign to me. By Keyes’s measure, we get the campaigns we deserve. The professionally packaged, enhanced neo-truths of this campaign were small acts of domestic terrorism. The first casualty of lies – in a campaign or a home — is trust.

Welcome to the post-trust society.

As the polling check-in assistant, I helped voters sign in. My instructions, provided by the official poll worker election guide, were to ask each voter for his or her name and address; in most cases, no ID would be required or requested. Yet, voter after voter whipped out a driver license or military ID.

“Do they always show you their ID?” I asked my poll captain, who has been hosting polling in her garage for over three decades.

“They didn’t used to. Not this much.”

She said the trend started a couple years ago, and increases with every election. This election, at least half of the voters produced  their IDs without being asked. What’s going on here? Perhaps they’ve heard so much about voter intimidation and suppression that they assume they’ll be carded.

Here’s another, more troubling, possibility. Since 9/11, Americans have become accustomed – too accustomed — to producing their IDs, especially if they travel frequently. New, post-trust products help us do this. Recently, I bought a wallet with a see-through pocket on its outer surface, enabling me to show my ID quickly. Security is a good thing, most of the time. But a conditioned reflex to produce an ID without being asked is not.

In the post-trust society, we’re guilty until proven innocent.

Current punditry holds that Bush triumphed because he attracted the so-called morality vote – voters appalled by gay marriage, stem cell research, and abortion. By this view, it’s not “the economy, stupid,” it’s “the morality, heathen.” I have trouble with this suddenly-popular analysis.

It suggests that people who voted for Kerry are not equally committed to morality, or that moral arguments cannot be made on both sides of these issues. It also neglects to mention the moral reasoning or religious sensibility that objects to a foreign policy that has killed tens of thousands of civilians in Iraq, or policies that neglect the hunger and hurt of the least of our own citizens.

A more precise analysis might be: it’s the traditions, friend.

During a time of fear, technological change and lack of trust, people don’t like their traditions messed with, whether it’s the traditional definition of marriage, a cross on a hill, or the way they vote.

As I helped my fellow poll workers pack up the ballots late Tuesday night, I was impatient and irritated. I wanted to be home watching the election results. Then I remembered I was holding the results in my own hands. Slowing down and doing this job right was a matter of trust.

Louv’s column appears on Sundays.

Mike Harden

When Ralph Keyes says his new book on lying in America is doing well, he might be telling the truth.

Then again, Keyes, a Yellow Springs author and social commentator, also implied that it is wise to tell curious journalists that one’s book is 16th on the best-seller lists. The two most-quoted tabulations publicize only the top 15.

Keyes’s publisher, St. Martin’s Press, was wise to bring out The Post-Truth Era in the desperate, dwindling days of a take-no-prisoners presidential race.

“I’ve been doing all of these call-in talk shows,” Keyes said last week. “All anybody wants to talk about is who is the bigger liar, Bush or Kerry.

“The point that fascinates me is the lengths to which voters will go to defend their candidate’s lying. ‘My guy’s lie is understandable, but your guy’s lie is contemptible.’ ”

Lying has become such an immutable part of political vernacular that the only accepted premise in a discussion on the subject is who lies most. “To politicians,” Keyes said, “the question ‘Will it fly?’ is much more important than ‘Is it true?’ ”

The author ventured, “Democrats are more likely to be dishonest about their persona. Republicans, on a broader scale, are more likely to deceive us on policy: their intentions in Iraq, the numbers involved in the tax cut and Medicare benefits.”

Although Democrats have lied through their teeth on matters of great moral consequence — “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” — Keyes said the Dems seem to have a penchant for what he calls “dippy, little lies.”

When Hillary Clinton was introduced to mountain climber Sir Edmund Hillary, she boasted that she had been named for him, even though he was an obscure New Zealand beekeeper six years away from Mount Everest and fame when she was born in 1947.

Al Gore kept repeating a story about being sung to sleep in his childhood with a particular union lullaby until it was pointed out that the ditty was not written until he was 27.

Keyes rated Bill Clinton a “genius-grade” flimflammer on marijuana, the military and Monica as well as on small-potatoes prevarications, making one wonder if the former president told the dippy lies to keep in practice for upcoming whoppers.

Keyes said of the current state of lying in America, “In the post-truth era, we don’t just have truth and lies but a third category of ambiguous statements that are not exactly the truth but fall just short of a lie. Enhanced truth, it might be called, neo-truth, soft truth, faux truth, truth lite.”

Among his many insights:

* Americans tell an average of 13 lies a week.

* The most common two lies are “I’m fine” and “I’m sorry, I can’t come to the phone right now.” Somewhere in the top 10 is “No, that dress doesn’t make you look fat at all.”

* Men lie to impress; women, to oblige. Wrote Keyes, “Men specialize in self-aggrandizing lies” such as ” ‘I just swung a big deal — huge’; women in charitable ones” like ” ‘Love the dress’ or fibs that are self-protective” including ” ‘I eat mostly low-fat foods.’ ”

* The most commonplace lies often are told to protect the liar as well as the lied to. We answer the offhand inquiry about our health with “I’m fine” because no one wants to know the vivid particulars of irritable bowel syndrome.

In his research, Keyes heard lying euphemized in many ways, though long after the book is history, he likely will recall a psychiatrist who said of a habitually lying patient, “He is someone for whom the truth is temporarily unavailable.”

Mike Harden is a Dispatch columnist

Indeed, dishonesty is our society is so prevalent that the truth-teller is currently at a distinct disadvantage. The witness is a judicial proceeding who tells the truth without embellishment will be discounted, as judges and juries presume that the witness, like all those before them, has exaggerated. Similarly, the job applicant who does not fudge will be rejected, as fudging is now presumed.

Despite its weighty subject, Mr. Keyes’ writing style is engaging. Moreover, the validity of Mr. Keyes’ points are reinforced by everyday life. I highly recommend this book.top

Evan Haglund “elhaglund” (Phoenix, AZ)

When I was four or perhaps five years old I was out on the porch playing with a child’s set of plastic carpenter’s tools with a neighbor child, Curt Tacey.  For reasons lost to history, I took the hammer and clunked Curt on the head with it.  Curt went off and informed his mother of this development, who informed my mother, who came out to consult with me.  Asked how it had come to pass that a hammer had hit Curt on the head, I, thinking quickly, replied: “It fell off the roof.”

I do not know how those of who are reading this column would characterize my statement.  I do, however, strongly suspect how Ralph Keyes, author of the recently published, The Post-Truth Era, would characterize it.  Mr. Keyes, I think, would say that I was lying.

Lying is a wonderful subject, and not given nearly the honest attention it deserves.  Such attention it now receives from Mr. Keyes, whose work to date consists in fair measure of giving intelligent consideration to fairly everyday things – the lifelong effects of one’s high school, or one’s height.  Here, as elsewhere, his approach to the subject is comprehensive, calling upon an extensive body of research and covering lying through history, lying across varied cultures and age groups, and lying by chimpanzees, specifically Koko, the laboratory chimp who having mastered the rudiments of abstract communication immediately began to fib.

There is, of course, a serious core.  While obviously there are no reliable figures to be cited, Mr. Keyes is doubtless correct in asserting that lying is becoming more common.  The rise of moral relativism may make it less clear just what a lie is.  The fragmented nature of our lives might make it seem less likely that a given lie will come back to haunt one.

Mr. Keyes’ book is both pertinent and well-timed.  We have just survived a presidential election in which both campaigns devoted vast expertise to “spinning” each candidate’s remarks, so that voters would not confuse what a candidate actually said with what the candidate actually said.  Indeed, straightforward statement is so rare in public life that when attorney general Janet Reno took responsibility for the fiasco at Waco, she briefly became something of a national hero.  Fiascos, we have plenty of.  But honesty – now that’s news.

All societies, Mr. Keyes writes, have liars, though commonly the opprobrium they attach to lying is conditional.  Lying to an outsider is more tolerable than lying to a member of one’s own people.  Distressingly, he reports that the young women of American Samoa who regaled anthropologist Margaret Mead with impressive tales of sexual frivol were almost certainly putting her, an outsider, on.

Fortunately, he reports, there are substantial bars to lying.  People are less inclined to lie in what they see as the central arena of their lives.  He tells of one potential homebuyer, upset with the transparent dishonesty of the seller, who is startled to learn that the owner has, in his regular business dealings, a splendid reputation for integrity.  Lying in his business dealings would undermine his reputation, a thing that has value in business.  Lying to a homebuyer is, well, free.

In the end, Mr. Keyes’ book becomes an endorsement of the individual – to be known to be as good as one’s word is a remarkably empowering thing – and of the community, which, to the extent it can fairly believe what its members say, has that much less need to regulate and check up on them.  The little boy who cried wolf, after all, eventually came to a point at which he needed others to believe him.  And they didn’t.  That’s wolf, one; boy, nothing, if you’re scoring.

Mark Bernstein

Have we now reached a stage of social evolution that is “beyond honesty?” That fascinating question is raised by author Ralph Keyes in his new book, The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life. “I think it’s fair to say that honesty is on the ropes,” Keyes observes. “Deception has become commonplace at all levels of contemporary life.”

By the time you finish reading The Post-Truth Era, Keyes is likely to have convinced you that dishonesty is now the order of the day, and that deception has now been institutionalized at virtually every level of American culture.

Keyes is an author of keen perception and wide-ranging observation. He has pulled together an enormous body of evidence, all pointing to the pervasive rise of dishonesty in American life. As Jeremy Campbell remarked in The Liars’ Tale, “It is a creeping assumption at the start of a new millennium that there are things more important than truth.”

Keyes acknowledges that human beings have lied in the past, but he suggests that the current generation of liars has developed a skillfulness and nuance in lying that is virtually unprecedented in the human experience. “Even though there have always been liars, lies have usually been told with hesitation, a dash of anxiety, a bit of guilt, a little shame, at least some sheepishness,” Keyes notes. “Now, clever people that we are, we have come up with rationales for tampering with truth so we can dissemble guilt-free.”

Keyes has a label for this new age of dishonesty. “I call it post-truth. We live in a post-truth era.” Keyes credits the late Steve Tesich with coining this phrase, but Keyes now applies it with vigor to our contemporary culture. “Post-truthfulness exists in an ethical twilight zone,” he explains. “It allows us to dissemble without considering ourselves dishonest. When our behavior conflicts with our values, what we’re most likely to do is reconceive our values.” Since we do not want to think of ourselves as unethical, we simply “devise alternative approaches to morality.”

As evidence of this cultural acceptance of lying, Keyes notes the rise of euphemisms for deception. “We no longer tell lies. Instead we ‘misspeak.’ We ‘exaggerate.’ We ‘exercise poor judgment.’ ‘Mistakes were made,’ we say. The term ‘deceive’ gives way to the more playful ‘spin.’ At worst, saying ‘I wasn’t truthful’ sounds better than ‘I lied’.” Keyes suggests that the use of such euphemisms is a new cultural syndrome he identifies as “euphemasia.” This would include everything from terms such as “credibility gap,” to Winston Churchill’s “terminological inexactitudes.”

What are we to do with terms such as “poetic truth,” “nuanced truth,” “alternative reality,” or “strategic misrepresentations?” In our technological age, driven by a digitalized dimension of lying, we are now accustomed to talking about “virtual truth.”

In a fascinating section, Keyes traces the history of lying. He suggests that early civilizations depended on honesty, at least within the kinship group, for the establishment of stable order and trust. Once society becomes more complicated and diverse, lying becomes more routine. In some cultures, lying to an enemy or a stranger is not considered immoral at all.

In more modern eras, lying was raised to a higher art form. In the history of Protestant confessionalism, creeds were to be accepted “without hesitation or mental reservation.” This language continues among confessional Christians, who may wonder how the term “mental reservation” emerged in the first place.

Keyes supplies this explanation, tracing the use of “mental reservation” back to the Reformation era, when Catholics developed “mental reservation” as a defense for telling an untruth under threat of persecution. “In time, however, it became an easy way to rationalize all manner of prevarication,” Keyes explains. The device of “mental reservation” allowed an individual to hold or “reserve” the truth to himself even as he misled an interrogator. Before long, others used this excuse in order to give apparent assent to creedal statements while privately rejecting the very truths articulated in the statement of faith.

Just how important is honesty, after all? “Honesty’s market value is too little appreciated in the history of ethics,” Keyes argues. “Truth telling underlies not just individual reputations but the health of society as a whole.” Without honesty, there can be no confidence in legal contracts, no shared confidence in social arrangements, and no authority for the rule of law. As argued by Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, a healthy society can’t remain healthy so long as it accepts lies. “For a lie always harms another,” Kant asserted, “if not some other particular man, still it harms mankind generally, for it vitiates the source of law itself.”

Is lying a symptom of social pathology? Keyes considers the argument that social dislocation and disconnectedness breed dishonesty. Surveying modern sociological literature, Keyes acknowledges a link between post-truthfulness and the loss of community. “When it comes to post-truthfulness, the fraying of human connections is both cause and effect. Not feeling connected to others makes it easier to lie, which in turn makes it harder to reconnect. Eroded communities foster dishonesty. Dishonesty contributes to the further erosion of communities. As communal bonds wither, unfettered self-interest is unleashed.”

Most of us are largely unaware of the pervasive dishonesty around us–even the dishonesty and deception included in our understanding of the past. Keyes goes after several of America’s most cherished historical legends, demonstrating that many are “apocryphal in whole or in part.” The famous story of George Washington and the cherry tree was invented by a moralistic clergyman, ironically as an argument for honesty.

“Puffery is an art form in the United States,” Keyes asserts. Self-invention becomes a way of climbing the social ladder. Ralph Lifshitz transforms himself into Ralph Lauren, and spawns one of America’s most famous and profitable lifestyle brands. The classical and Anglophile style of Ralph Lauren’s designs would be more awkwardly marketed under the name, Ralph Lifshitz.

Martha Stewart, now serving time in federal prison for lying to federal authorities, is identified by Keyes as one of “the quintessential reinvented Americans.” Unlike Ralph Lauren, who openly acknowledges his origins, Keyes accuses Martha Stewart of going to incredible and extreme effort to hide her humble roots.

In an article written for an early issue of Martha Stewart Living, Stewart wrote an editorial tribute to honesty. “We must remember,” she chided, “–and teach our children (and perhaps our political figures)–one essential; the truth shall make you free.” Nevertheless, Keyes presents a very different picture of America’s domestic adviser. “Martha Stewart routinely misrepresented the type of family she grew up in, her father’s occupation, whom she dated in college, where her roommate was from, what she earned as a model, the size of party she threw, her husband’s ability to father children, how much of her own writing she did, where her home was located (to avoid paying taxes), and why she sold her ImClone stocks.”

In the professional world, resumes are now assumed to be inflated. San Francisco mayor Willie Brown once observed, “I don’t know anyone who doesn’t lie on their resume.” The most pervasive form of “credential inflation” is the listing of unearned degrees. “An estimated half million Americans hold jobs for which their purported qualifications are spurious,” Keyes reports, adding that an investigation conducted by the General Accounting Office once revealed twenty-eight senior federal officials who did not actually hold the college degrees they claimed. Hauntingly, Keyes relates that one personnel official with a hospital told him that job applicants, once informed that their credentials would be checked by a professional firm, sometimes withdrew their applications. Reportedly, nearly a third of those applying for positions took back their applications and never returned.

Making his way through the terrain of deception in American life, Keyes notes that some individuals have become “recreational liars.” They spin tales which are willingly received by some as truths. While this may appear harmless, the practice lowers the credibility of the entire society.

What about the law? According to Black’s Law Dictionary, a “legal fiction” is “an assumption that something is true even though it may be untrue.” In other words, lawyers are obligated, according to the professional standards of the bar, to use whatever argument will work in defending a client, whether or not it is true. In one perverse case, Keyes documents the work of one Florida prosecutor who argued in one courtroom that a pair of teenage boys had killed their father and then entered another courtroom to argue that a family friend–not the teenagers–was the real murderer. “From a strictly legal perspective this was not inconsistent,” Keyes observes, “but it certainly put a spotlight on the contrast between concepts of truthfulness within courts of law and those without.”

Lies are now routinely accepted in political argument and in literature. The line between fiction and nonfiction is now blurry at best. Some recent best-selling titles in the “non-fiction” category have been highly fictional. Does anyone even care?

Keyes identifies the academic world as the source of much confusion when it comes to honesty. Postmodern philosophers routinely dismiss objective truth, and assert that all truth is simply social construction and invention. Authorities in power simply invent truth in order to buttress their authority, the postmodernists allege. Following this logic, lying becomes a means of liberation. As Keyes observes, “Jeremy Campbell exaggerated only slightly when he observed that to a postmodernist, being overly concerned with telling the truth ‘is a sign of depleted resources, a psychological disorder, a character defect, a kind of linguistic anorexia’.”

Debunking the postmodernist worldview, Keyes simply clarifies the obvious: “Asking what constitutes truth is an appropriate topic for intellectual inquiry, but it doesn’t follow that the difficulty of identifying what is objectively true gives us license to tell each other lies.”

The Post-Truth Era offers perceptive analysis of American culture in the new millennium. Without the recovery of truth, this civilization is doomed to a descent into even deeper levels of deception and dishonesty. As a culture, it’s about time we faced the truth about our acceptance of untruthfulness.

R. Albert Mohler, Jr.

Among the most fascinating things in Ralph Keyes’s The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life (St. Martin’s, $24.95) is his look at the ways in which morality and leadership converge. Keyes relates the results of studies by Caroline Keating of Colgate University showing that “an ability to lie was the single best predictor of male dominance. This led her to conclude that, among men at least, the same traits that make a good liar also make a good leader.” This exceptional book asks and answers a diverse series of questions. Do we have a biological predisposition to lie? (Probably.) Do we lie more than our ancestors did? (Maybe.) Do we have a higher tolerance for dishonesty than our ancestors? (Yes.) Can animals lie? (Koko the gorilla certainly did.) Have therapists, politicians, lawyers, postmodernists, Hollywood hustlers, journalists and others played a role in creating a culture of lying? (An extensive one.) Is there any hope for truthfulness? (Yes.) Keyes also provides a brief history of philosophical and theological positions on lying, as well as anthropological data on the practice. He argues convincingly that groups have always found lies to outsiders acceptable but lies to in-group members contemptible. The more impersonal a society becomes, the greater the opportunities for lying, and the fewer the consequences for the individual liar. (This is particularly sobering in today’s Internet-crazed and highly mobile America.) That Keyes can do all this without unleashing a jeremiad or throwing his hands up in despair is extraordinary. Can one make a case for honesty? Keyes does so persuasively, largely because of his willingness to study every good argument — not just the ones that he might support. He tells us that we “could accept every post-modern point about the elusiveness of truth (and even add some), yet still conclude that the attempt to be truthful is not only noble but essential for human well-being.” What about the quotidian lies we tell to lubricate social interaction? We all say, “I’m fine” when we’re not, or tell sick patients, “You look great.” Aren’t these easily justified? Keyes notes that they may do more to make the teller’s life easier than the recipient’s, adding that “any lie — no matter how small — is a vote of no confidence in the person to whom it’s told.” Perhaps his most convincing argument about why we should tell the truth is that, for social creatures, “telling the truth is a way of affirming human ties. . . . Just as lying degrades human connections, truthfulness invigorates them.” Keyes’s book deserves a wide readership. Daniel McMahon

Is all that matters in contemporary culture whether a line sounds good? That’s the thesis of an important, provocative new book, The Post-Truth Era, by Ralph Keyes. It’s Keyes’s thesis that in the current ethos, whether something is believed has become more important than whether it’s true. Keyes cites psychological research showing that people lie far more often than we’d like to think–constantly telling petty lies they think will never be detected and often telling whoppers, even to friends and loved ones. One study showed that 28 percent of conversations among friends contained conscious lies, and 77 percent of conversations between strangers did so. The lies were on matters of substance, not just “your column is good today” and the many similar prevarications intended to avoid hurt feelings.

So perhaps Americans are no longer outraged when politicians lie because we lie so often in our daily lives. Much everyday lying, Keyes says, concerns constructing attractive pasts for ourselves. “I was the quarterback on my high school football team” or “I have a master’s degree” or “I had lots of proposals of marriage” or many other claims along these lines are told both to impress others and to make ourselves feel our own pasts were richer or more accomplished. … Americans like and even admire personal mythmaking and thus don’t seem to object much when political figures lie to puff up their pasts. Lyndon Johnson, for example, constantly told audiences his grandfather died at the Alamo; his grandfather died at home in bed, but an Alamo myth made Texas voters more comfortable with LBJ. Jesse Ventura elaborately claimed to have been a Navy SEAL and to have fought in Vietnam. Keyes contends that neither claim was true–but the mythical Ventura had proven attractive to voters. LBJ and Ventura, it must be noted, came out ahead by presenting personal histories they wished were true.

There are many other examples, and The Post-Truth Era collects dozens, making it an invaluable compendium of the decline of respect for verity in modern culture. Today many would rather watch a docudrama, in which viewers have absolutely no idea what is historical and what is imaginary, than read carefully researched history. The made-up version is more interesting! Many would rather listen to Michael Moore or the Swift Boat guys–Moore on the left and the Swifties on the right being current exemplars of post-truth politics–since the sort of arguments in which it doesn’t matter what is true are more fun than tedious accuracy. The really disturbing trend, Keyes argues, is that so many figures in contemporary politics, literature, journalism, and other fields get away with so much lying about themselves. The public appears to prefer the post-truth version.

Keyes blames the decline of respect for truth partly on intellectual modernism and postmodernism. Intellectuals, he says, crusaded to convince people that there are no absolute truths, that everything is contingent or based on frames of reference. Calamity descended as people actually decided to believe this. Postmodernism’s worst idea has infected popular culture, and now millions of Americans and Europeans believe that nothing is really truth.  … I commend to readers The Post-Truth Era as an antidote.  Gregg Easterbrook

Lying is so much a part of everyday life that everybody does it and everybody expects it, even while polls show Americans long for ethics and integrity in public officials. Keyes examines how we have come to the troubling trend toward the “routinization of dishonesty.” In part one of this fascinating book, he provides a brief history of lying from the medieval ages to the present and explores the reasons behind the decline in ethics. Part two focuses on how modern culture inadvertently promotes lying by downplaying ethical issues while emphasizing emotional health and placing more emphasis on personal, professional, and national myth making. The result is the rise in high-profile liars among journalists, politicians, and corporate executives. Finally, Keyes examines the consequences of a culture that tolerates lying as a “no-fault transgression” with little or no consequences for the liar but a disturbing rise in suspicion throughout the culture. This is a thoughtful, often amusing look at the way we dodge the truth and tolerate dishonesty. Vanessa Bush

Apparently the biggest problem Mr. Keyes faced when writing his book was to get the people he was interviewing admit that they took risks at all. He spoke with skydivers, artists, high-wire walkers, strippers, businessmen and families. Even the wildest stunt or adventure was not deemed ‘risky’ in the eyes of the person doing it.

This sounds strange at first, but consider the fact that we all have choices. What’s riskier – to skydive from an airplane, or to climb a wall of ice? If you choose to look at these activities purely from statistics, they are both safer than driving to work. Do you consider yourself a risk-taker as you drive to work? Probably not. We have convinced ourselves that it is safe.

Herein lies the problem of defining risk. It’s only as risky as you believe it to be. I recently watched a video about extreme skiing. One of the skiers was providing some tips. One was “Don’t listen to other people tell you what you can’t do, because they’re only telling you what they can’t do.”

Risk is personal. An important point in the book was in evolutionary terms. “For 99 percent of human existence, danger, fear and the need to confront fear were our daily companions. We were risk takers because we had to be.” Now we are risk takers as we desire. And to some degree, we all desire risk.

For some, it may be riskier to deal with the guilt of being too scared to do an ice climb, than to actually climb the darned thing. So they take the easy way out and climb it. For others, the concept of climbing ice terrifies them so much, they drive to their favorite ski hill on the most dangerous road in the area and go skiing to forget they ever heard of ice climbing.

Say no more to risk avoiding excuses… Take a moment to consider the risks that you’re already taking in your life. Your career, your relationship, your sports, your pastimes, your education, your future. Whether you think so or not, each decision you have made in each of these areas are all risks.

Ask yourself if taking these risks have made you feel better about yourself, and your control over your life. If the answer is yes, then please make sure you keep taking them. If the answer is no, then take some more and check again. Risks are powerful, and risks are part of your life. Take control. Seize the Day!

- Kevin Thomson

There’s a good book on this whole subject, called The Height of Your Life by Ralph Keyes, in which he talks about the role that height plays in American society.  One chapter goes over how height and romance mix (or don’t mix, as the case may be).  Interesting reading.

I’m currently reading The Height of Your Life by Ralph Keyes, which I’d recommend as a compelling and fun read for anyone interested in the subject of human height …

N.R. Kleinfield

Tom Ferrell

John Leonard

William Safire

William Safire

Edmund Morris

Robert Siegel

Noah Adams

One of my favorite books of recent years is Ralph Keyes’s Is There Life After High School? Keyes wrote the book before the recent outbreak of school killings, and, of course, went to high school decades before such things were contemplated.  But I’d be darned well interested to see what the heck he’d have to say about the modern adolescent society.

… read the excellent book by Ralph Keyes, Is There Life After High School?

Doug Carroll, The Arizona Republic

Doug Carroll, The Arizona Republic, July 4, 2000

Now when I feel the submission (and rejection) blues, which I’m certain I will, I’ll just reach for Mr. Keyes book and at the very least be able to console myself with the fact that, once upon a time, even the blockbuster names we’re all so familiar with had to go through the very same thing

Jill

If any of you are writing book addicts (are all writers or is it just me?) I would strongly recommend you get a copy of The Writer’s Book of Hope by Ralph Keyes. It’s all about the anxiety, frustration and despair that writer’s face every time they sit down to commit words to paper. . The books relates many accounts of the struggles now famous authors had to go through to find success and reminds us that even these successful authors still sit at their keyboard terrified that the words will dry up or that what they are writing is crap. It shows that everyone, whether a first-time novelist or seasoned professional is plagued by frustration that what they actually put on paper doesn’t come up to what they imagine in their head.

The Scribe’s Message Board

Mike Harden

As a champion of the writer’s art, he tries to avoid sounding like a cross between Dr. Phil and the preface of a Chicken Soup anthology.

“There are so many books out there that say all you need to do is meditate, do some affirmations, let your pen follow its course and you’re going to be a writer,” Ralph Keyes said.

The author of a dozen books and a writing instructor for three decades, Keyes, of Yellow Springs, has always endeavored to tread the path of “honest reassurance” that falls somewhere between sadistic Kathy Bates in Misery and “There, there. Everybody is going to be OK.”

Everybody is not going to be OK. Some will be infinitely better Wal-Mart greeters than wordsmiths.

Telling one from another still baffles Keyes, who would politely demur if asked to identify who might most benefit from his newly published The Writer’s Book of Hope: Getting From Frustration to Publication (Henry Holt, $13).

Students who didn’t have a whisper of a chance (in Keyes’ estimation) have published. And, he added, “I’ve had some so committed and so talented, and they end up selling real estate.”

Sorting posers and peacocks from the real producers is made no easier by the aura and allure associated with writing.

“I sometimes think there is nobody out there who is not a closet writer,” Keyes said.

No one ever boasts at a cocktail party, “I’m a frustrated urologist.”

Being an author is “the geek’s version of being a rock star,” Keyes said.

Still, he knows that some of the best-selling books of 2006 are yet a source of unfinished anguish to writers whose names have never crossed the lips of reviewers.

Accordingly, he penned The Writer’s Book of Hope for those writers to whom mornings sometimes begin with a coin-toss decision between pushing on or firing up the paper shredder.

“The hardest part of being a writer is not getting your commas in the right place but getting your head in the right place.”

Part of that process is dealing with discouragers, a topic to which he devotes an entire chapter.

“An Ohio State professor,” Keyes wrote, “told Harlan Ellison that he had no writing talent. By legend, Ellison sent this professor a copy of every one of the dozens of novels he proceeded to publish after dropping out from OSU.”

When, at 26, Margaret Atwood published her first collection of verse, her brother wrote: “Congratulations on publishing your first book of poetry. I used to do that kind of thing myself when I was younger.”

The chapter “Dealing With Discouragers” is immediately followed by one of equal importance, “Exorcising Excuses.”

In the latter, Keyes tries to steer would-be writers away from what he calls the “as-soon-as syndrome”:

As soon as the kids are grown, the dog dies, I leave my husband, I get a better computer or a pristine place to write.

Once it becomes clear that neither one’s dog nor one’s husband is going to die anytime soon, the next hurdle is the all-time bugaboo of scribes: writer’s block.

Keyes suggests using the same approach to writing that has made 12-step programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous successful for decades — one page at a time.

“Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish,” said Keyes, quoting author John Steinbeck. “Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day.”

Lower your standards, he suggests of overcoming writer’s block. He notes that even the immensely gifted Stanley Kunitz has confessed, “The poem in the head is always perfect.”

Ultimately, the best reason to follow Keyes’ advice may be not his 30 years of teaching the craft so much as the simple fact that he has moved on from publishing his 12th book to his 13th.

- Mike Harden is a Dispatch columnist

The book is clearly the result of a lot of research. (Check out the photos on Keyes’ Web site showing the yards of file cabinets in his house.) Keyes doesn’t trot out the tired authors’ anecdotes that we’ve all heard before; he serves up a host of tidbits that were new to me. The quotes by masters (such as Tolstoy) about their lack of “talent” are alone worth the price of the book. I also appreciated Keyes’ no-nonsense tone. I was expecting New Age warmth and fuzziness, but Keyes pulls no punches. Take his observation that some people who give up writing do so not because they lack talent, but because they are uncomfortable spending long periods alone. That’s not a “nice” thing to say, but it’s truthful and important to know.

The Writer’s Book of Hope delivers on its promise. It provides practical hope and inspiration to writers based on a clear-eyed view of the writing profession. It gave me a new lease on my writing life.

Adam Schwartz, Bloomington, IN

The book is full of clear information about subtle and direct discouragers of writing and about the availability of encouragers and where to find them. Keyes tells the writer how to get started, keep going, get help and how to finally find and influence publishers to get your book in print. Chapter titles include “Dealing with Discouragers,” “Exorcizing Excuses,” and “The Publishing Tribe.” Ralph Keyes has been teaching writing for over thirty years while himself publishing ten books and countless articles. The writer henefits from the experience and insight of a person who has watched hundreds of writing projects begin and far fewer achieve completion — and has learned what makes the difference.

Charles J. O’Leary, Ph.D, Arvada, CO

Heybubb, New York City

Bruce Holland Rogers, Toronto, author of Word Work: Surviving and Thriving as a Writer

To say that Keyes understands the pain of a writer’s life would be an understatement. He explores every anxiety, every insecurity, every fear you might face, and then helps you get beyond them. Take writer’s block, for example. Keyes blames it on unrealistic expectations. He urges you to accept the fact that your writing will always be imperfect and tells you to get on with it anyway.

Keyes style is to skillfully describe a problem and then present an alternate view, a way of overcoming the obstacle. The book is filled with useful anecdotes and examples taken from real life. Just had your short story rejected? Keyes tells you how Saul Bellow had his stories rejected, even though he’d just won the Nobel Prize for literature. Can’t sell your first novel? Keyes explains how mega-bestselling author John Grisham was forced to peddle his first novel out of the trunk of his Volvo.

The first part of Keyes’ book explains “internal” obstacles to writing: how we stop ourselves through anxiety, frustration and despair. He wants writers to understand that these negative feelings are normal, even among the greatest writers. F. Scott Fitzgerald, after finishing The Great Gatsby, spoke of being “overcome with fears and forebodings.” Gustave Flaubert was completely neurotic while writing Madame Bovary. Alas, neurosis is probably part of every writer’s makeup, but Keyes shows that you can learn to make peace with it.

Keyes also helps you understand the negative feelings you get from other people, people he calls “discouragers.” These are family members, teachers, co-workers and others who think you’re being “unrealistic” by trying to be a writer—the folks who say, “Sure, you’re a writer, but what do you really do?” Keyes explains the mindset of these discouragers: They’re usually jealous that you’re following your dreams. “I’ll show you,” is perhaps the best response to them.

Keyes is no dummy. He knows the odds are against you if you try to get a book published. What he does, and does brilliantly, is to show you that publishers have been wrong time and time again. Dozens of publishers rejected Grisham and Tom Clancy and most of the writers who are today’s household names. “The truth is,” Keyes says, “that when it comes to predicting which books will succeed in the marketplace, pub[lishing] people are close to clueless.” And Keyes explains why. He describes publishing people as limited in outlook. They mostly live in New York City. They mostly attended the same elite Eastern colleges. They mostly spend time talking to each other, rather than to the general book-buying public.

After reading Keyes’ perspective on publishing people, you’ll never again look upon them as infallible judges of your work. This is decidedly a good thing. Keyes urges you to trust your own valuation of your work above all others’. You need to push on despite the inevitable rejections.

The final part of Keyes’ book tells you 10 ways to keep hope alive, especially if you’re feeling low. One way is to keep in mind all the great writers who have been rejected in the past. Your book’s not selling well? Melville’s Moby Dick was a complete commercial failure. You might join a writers group for the support it provides. Keyes also highly recommends doing something you’re doing right now: reading publications such as The Writer.

Other reasons for hope? Keyes believes the Internet is one, since it gives writers direct access to readers. Also encouraging is the proliferation of small presses and the ease of self-publishing.

Keyes concludes with a helpful alternative to the difficulties of publishing: the joys of writing for its own sake. The immortal Emily Dickinson published a few poems in her lifetime, but then discovered that she was happy not to be published. “Publishing,” Keyes says,     “is only one measure of success. There are many others . . . ” This book, with its compassionate understanding of the writer’s fragile psyche, is sure to lift your spirits when you’re feeling blue.

Chuck Leddy

Chuck Leddy of Quincy, Mass., writes reviews for the Denver Post and other publications and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

October 2003 – Susan K. Perry, Ph.D

More than half of Keyes’ book is devoted to helping writers sustain faith in themselves once they being actively pursuing publication. Keyes makes excellent use of hundreds of anecdotes and quotes from well known writers. For instance, Kipling was told he didn’t know how to use the English language; Orwell’s Animal Farm was rejected for being tough to categorize; The Diary of Anne Frank was turned down by one publisher as being lacking in feeling. Keyes offers multiple examples of writers who succeeded against the odds, who kept hope alive, persisted, and prevailed. Informative and highly readable.

Ralph Keyes … has a new guide out this fall. Titled The Writer’s Book of Hope: Getting From Frustration to Publication (Owl Books, $13), it is a nice companion to his 1995 book, The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear. Not only does Keyes explore what it means to have hope, he also takes the writer through the fears and the terrible process of rejection. His lucid writing will comfort and inspire any writer – aspiring or established.

Ralph Keyes says in his book The Courage to Write to use the fear.  That’s what they taught me in boot camp too.  So don’t exorcise the fear, exercise it!

The next day was more normal … started with a little tennis, a little lunch, a trip to Davis-Kidd (my absolute favorite bookstore, at least east of the Rocky Mountains J.  Found a great book called The Courage to Write by Ralph Keyes (Henry Holt publisher).

If you liked Bird by Bird, I might also suggest The Courage to Write by Ralph Keyes.  It’s not as funny, but hits the issues on target.

Read the book The Courage to Write by Ralph Keyes … He tackles the issue [of offending those you write about] head-on by explaining that this is just one of the perils of writing.  He suggests flattering your family, friends or other “fictional” subjects, by telling them you would like to write about them.  Typically people don’t object, he believes.

I’m not one to read books about writing, but I’ve made some exceptions lately to help with my career reversal.  I read an interesting one recently titled The Courage to Write by Ralph Keyes.  Some of the thoughts in this book on how writers confront and deal with fear actually helped me swallow and savor the lump in my throat when I gave my “I’m outa here” speech to the editors of the magazine that has employed me for seven years and more.

The book is rich both in thoughtful insights on the nature of the fears professional writers face each morning and in anecdotes about how successful writers have dealt with those fears.

You might want to check out a wonderful book called The Courage to Write by Ralph Keyes.  It’s about how one’s own fears affect writing and how we as writers can make use of those fears.  I found it very helpful.

Regardless of whether you are interested in writing, this is an excellent book.