"A open wound," and "a optional stock"

This drives me crazy.  Batty!  What the heck is going on with people dropping the "n" when combining two vowels?! "All this proved to be a excellent source of information."  Ouch on the ears! These phrases were spoken by an otherwise highly-educated person! It's heard pervasively throughout the English lexicon nowadays.  It's AWFUL.  It's not cool!

"I had a accident"

It's not just Millenials who commit these unconscionable gaffes in popular speech - it's also doctors and lawyers, and even some journalists on national media.  It's atrocious.  From spelling errors, no doubt compounded by the shorthand required in texting, or Hollywood that has seen fit to turn all pronouns indiscriminately to the subjective, "I" ("between you and I," or "she gave you and I a nice gift," etc., etc., ad nauseum), now there is the dropping of the liaison "n" when two vowels are conjoined, as in "I had an accident."  It's heard everywhere; it's even written everywhere. Right there on Google, third in line, is "How do you find a interest rate." The English language is a precious gift.  To adulterate it seems a terrible practice, a sad practice, and does not bode well for Millenials, many of whom are mourning the sad economy or the dearth of jobs.  I wonder if jobs - or the economy, for that matter - would suffer as much if they focused as much on developing their brains as they do on the latest thumb-damaging gadgets.

One's brain and ability to think and extrapolate are some of the greatest gifts any of us will ever have - along with our health.  To suppress it; to refuse to educate it; to insist on drifting through life staring down on tiny screens and encouraging carpal tunnel syndrome is regrettable.  Somehow that word just doesn't do justice to the passion I feel.

Another one just came across the wires: "He is a 84-year-old man." Hurts the ears!

Body Language

In a recent TV program, Secrets of Body Language, on the esteemed History Channel, the narrator spoke of the when describing Yasser Arafat's obsequious back-patting and attempts to defer to his colleague as a sign of "apparent geniality."

"We pay so much attention to the words people speak; but remember, 93% of human communication is delivered through body language."

I posted that quote (of an experiment conducted by Albert Mehrabian in the 1960s and widely misinterpreted), onto LinkedIn, and started a firestorm, with people coming out of the woodwork eschewing that quote as outdated, a "myth," long ago refuted by other so-called experts.  The problem is not the quote, so much as the ongoing misinterpretation of the masses, even experts. Wikipedia has a great write-up about Mehrabian and the experiment in question that is worth reading.

In short, the experiment attempted to examine the elements of communication, including verbal, as well as non-verbal elements.  Mehrabian concluded that there are three basic elements in all face-to-face communication:

• Words
• Tone of voice
• Nonverbal behavior, such as facial expressions.

Note, importantly, that the experiment is very narrow in focus; moreover, the experiment was for face-to-face communication.  Surely, not all communication is conducted face to face, which adds another dimension to examining communication in general.  Nonetheless, in every respect, these experiments in communication assume human communication - we all know, of course, that communication occurs between and among species, but that's another story.