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Being the Christmas season, today’s sermon at church was based on the second chapter of Matthew’s gospel, when the wise men come to visit the baby Jesus. A familiar story, yes, but I wish to focus on verse 16, as I see a parallel between that time, two millennia ago in the middle east, and this time, today in America.

The prologue: Jesus is born, Magi (astrologers), led by “his (Jesus’) star,” come from the east (perhaps Persia) “to worship him.” Not-so-nice King Herod the Great, a power freak, is “troubled” by this, so he asks his priests for more information. Once he learns that the prophets foretold the Christ would be born in Bethlehem, he attempts to get the Magi to, after finding the baby, return to him and tell him, so he “too may come and worship him.” Yeah, right. The Magi receive a revelatory dream about King Nasty, ditch the idea of going back and telling him where the Messiah is, and head back home.

The point: “Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, became furious, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had ascertained from the wise men” (Matt. 2:17 (ESV)).

The parallel: With the innocent children singing at today’s service, and considering this infanticide promulgated by an evil tyrant, I found myself recalling the film “Sound of Freedom,” which I watched in July and wrote about here on August 17. If you have not yet seen it, do so. Here’s a link: https://www.angel.com/watch/sound-of-freedom. It provides the parallel: killing of innocent children by Herod then is perhaps surpassed in evilness by the killing of innocent pre-born children and the child sex trafficking that’s going on now. When you watch the film, I hope you have the same reaction I did–it saddened me and it sickened me–and that you are compelled to stand up against this evil. I believe a good first step there would be, if you really love your children, to get them out of the government-run schools, where the evil leftists are hell-bent on programming them to be minions of their malevolence.

How does the old Sunday school song go? Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.

Do you?

While listening to a popular Philadelphia-area radio station last week while working, at least once per hour there was aired a promotional spot warning about the potential dire results that await if we don’t vote on November 7 to protect abortion rights. They specifically target Pennsylvania supreme court candidate Republican Carolyn Carluccio who, according to the huge postcard that came in the mail, is the “hand-picked candidate” for “groups like the PA Pro-Life Federation,” who “are trying to take away our rights RIGHT NOW.”

Question: Do any of you feel that pro-life groups are trying to take away your rights? If so, which ones? Gee, maybe the title on the postcard is the answer, when it boldly announces “Abortion Rights Are on the Ballot AGAIN.”

Ms. Carluccio has a decent resume, and reportedly “wants a justice system that is fair and impartial.” Sounds good–right?

Her opponent seems qualified, with much experience, but in my opinion he is only a placeholder for the anti-God, anti-life, anti-children crowd that has taken over the Democrat party. Back in my Libertarian activist days, our claim was that the Republicrats and Demopublicans didn’t have a dime’s worth of difference between them, being the two legs on a monster marching America towards the precipice.

That is no longer the case.

I do not claim to extol the virtues of Republicans or decry all Democrats as nasty. What I do want to point out on Election Eve is that we Americans are in a battle of good versus evil. Sadly for the Democrats, evil has apparently chosen their party as the vehicle. Planned Parenthood (you know, the eugenics-based baby killers) is spending lots of money to push infanticide issues through political elections, and there’s one way to stop it–VOTE.

“Salvation is far from the wicked, for they do not see Your statutes,” Psalm 119:155 (NASB).

Does that describe those who are ruining our nation and destroying our children, both unborn and already born? They are wicked people who ignore God’s truth.

“I behold the treacherous and loathe them, because they do not keep Your word,” Psalm 119:158 (NASB).

God hates evil, and we are called to hate–loathe–it as well.

If the evil and treacherous are attempting to promote their sinful practices by achieving elected office and we the people have the power to allow or prevent that from happening, let’s do something this Election Day. Get to the polls tomorrow and cast your vote against evil.

It is, after all, the good and Godly thing to do.

Welcome to the third posting dealing with serving effectively as Grammarian at a club meeting. Thus far we have considered incomplete sentences and mispronunciations; let us turn our attention here in part III to grammatical mistakes (incorrect grammar).

Agreement in number – A peeve of mine is when a speaker uses the singular “someone” (or the synonymous “somebody”) then follows up by referring to “someone” as “they.” I understand, though disagree with, the supposed desire to be gender neutral, but in doing so the English grammar rules are violated. A simple examination of the word’s definition proves the point. Here is that definition, less the examples, from Noah Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language:

SOMEBODY, n. [some and body.] A person unknown or uncertain; a person indeterminate. 2. A person of consideration.

Note the singular “a person” appears three times, not the plural “persons” or “people.” As pointed out in a previous posting, people whose primary language is not English are more likely to introduce a singular/plural mismatch (my designation). Example: I heard a Chinese speaker say “that people(s)” rather than “that person” due to lack of familiarity with English.

Agreement in tense – Here’s another tricky one, the difference between “was” and “were.” Consider this sample sentence: If I was to go with you to the park, I would bring my baseball. Both are tenses of the verb “to be,” but “was” is the past tense–I was at the park yesterday–and “were” is the “hypothetical tense” of the subjunctive mode, in which supposition or hypothesis is expressed, and thus “If I were to go with you to the park. . . .” is the proper grammatical form here.

The Webster dictionary referenced above includes a grammar of the English language, and is available for purchase from many sources. I heartily recommend it to the serious student of the language, and the more serious you are about your English language skills, the more knowledge you possess, the better you will be prepared to competently serve as Grammarian. Our language is being abused and butchered. Serve as Grammarian, and help people fight back!

One of the elective project goals for this Blog was that the content be compelling. Feedback from the project’s evaluator and others have me reluctantly admitting that Toastmasters-based educational content, which was a primary reason for the Blog’s creation, is not very compelling. To spice things up a bit, this posting will seek the reader’s opinion on the current state of America’s public schools.

For those of you who are parents with school-aged children, how comfortable are you when they head off five days a week to a place where they are possibly exposed to:

• Drag queens?
• Gender pronoun selection?
• Critical Race Theory (when I was in school CRT meant Cathode Ray Tube!)?
• Anti-American, anti-God ideas?

What is the solution? I seek your opinion! Here are three possible responses I came up with:

1. I have no problem with the public schools and what they are doing with/to my children each weekday.
2. I don’t really like some of the stuff my children are being exposed to but we can’t really do much about it, other than put different people on the school board to hopefully fix the system.
3. The current system is abominable. Parents should yank their children from these immoral government-run youth indoctrination centers ASAP and put them in a private school or home school them.

What is your solution? 1, 2, 3, or something else? We would like to know.

Welcome to the second posting dealing with serving effectively as grammarian at a club meeting. In part I we considered incomplete sentences; let us turn our attention here in part II to mispronunciations.

A mispronunciation is, quite simply, the errant pronunciation of a word. The speaker might emphasize an incorrect syllable, or wrongly use a different word that is similarly pronounced. People whose primary language is not English are, based on my experience as a transcriptionist and Toastmaster, more likely to introduce mispronunciations.

I present two examples below, one for each type identified above. Please comment on this posting and provide other examples for our mutual benefit.

1. Incorrect syllable emphasis: There was an Indian man describing the details of his automobile accident, and when referring to someone in the crosswalk, he would say “puh-des-tree-uhn” rather than “puh-des-tree-uhn” for the word pedestrian. I figured it out, but it took some head scratching to realize what he was trying to say.
2. Here’s one that I hear when referring to the non-traffic zone in the middle of a highway. Rather than say, “There was a median separating the lanes of the highway,” one says, “There was a medium separating the lanes of the highway.” They sound similar, but have quite different meanings!

A final thought: realize that regional dialects can be a factor here, as can slang. Examples of the former would include “Wooster” for “Worcester” and “crick” for “creek,” while examples of the latter would include “ain’t” for “isn’t” and “’cause” for “because.”

I suggest flagging by the grammarian of their usage, but not if the context allows/calls for it. Is the context formal or colloquial¹? Example: I am giving a formal informational presentation about pollution of waterways and say, “Scientists agree that if individual Wooster property owners would cease dumping their used motor oil into the backyard crick, downstream flora and fauna would benefit, ‘cause it ain’t a good thing to do.” “Worcester,” “creek,” “because,” and “isn’t” would be the proper choices here, no? Let’s change the context a bit, though, to see when being “wrong” is right. In this instance I’m imitating someone from a rural down-south town named Worcester who is upset with the local waterway situation. His gripe to another person could rightly–and more interestingly–be as follows: “Them gosh-darned Wooster folk ain’t doin’ no thinkin’ at all, what with them a-dumpin’ their car oil in the crick, ‘cause they ain’t got no brains in their heads!” Yes, I also threw in a few other goodies, like “a-dumpin’” versus “dumping.” Do you see, though, how interesting and deliberate word choices can spice up one’s speech, even if they don’t pass the starched-collar grammarian tests?

I hope this helps you flag appropriately, while allowing the “gems” to be shared without reproach.

1“Characteristic of or appropriate to ordinary or familiar conversation rather than formal speech or writing; informal,” dictionary.com (14 May 2023).

“The grammarian plays an important role in helping all club members improve their grammar and vocabulary. I will listen to the language and grammar usage of all speakers, noting incomplete sentences, mispronunciations, grammatical mistakes, non-sequiturs, malapropisms, etc.”

That is the role description the grammarian at my club shares at the top of the meeting to describe her role responsibilities, but I wonder how many of us truly know what all these things are. In a multi-part posting, I will describe each of these, so that as meeting grammarian you have a better take on what your ears need to detect.

In this posting, we will consider incomplete sentences.

I suppose these occur more in conversational, interactive contexts than when delivering a speech. You start a sentence but never end it, putting in place the period. Instead, were it to appear in written form, it would end with an ellipsis.

Example: I was planning to go to the store, but . . .

Example: Were you going to give a speech at the next meeting, or . . .

I hear these on occasion in my position as a transcriptionist, and I confess that I’ve let things trail off on occasion. The ellipsis is a verbal invitation for the other party to jump in, but that’s in the case of a conversation. A speech is not a conversation, however, so the ellipsis is a bad thing.

Solution: Have mentally ready your complete thought, even if it requires you to take a moment to fully encapsulate it. Remember that in speech presentation a pause is a good thing, so use one if need be to finish in your mind the sentence. What happened as you were planning to go to the store? Were you or were you not going to give a speech at the next meeting?

Your audience would appreciate a complete thought, so why not provide it?

The arrival of COVID resulted in many clubs moving their meeting to Zoom or another online platform. My clubs still meet online for executive committee meetings, but for club meetings we’ve been back in person (or always were there) for a year or more now.

Fellow DTM Ken Krawchuk put together an award-winning speech titled “I HATE ZOOM!” I encourage you to watch the Zoom recording (at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwQVLCdLvmA) he prepared and join the conversation. Here are some food-for-thought questions:

Is Zoom something that you were grateful for when it was needed, then cast off with a sigh of relief once the need went away?

Did your club get hooked on Zoom, now finding itself unable to “kick the habit?”

Does an online meeting format, when not truly needed, benefit us, or does it contribute to laziness, in that members can sit at home in their skivvies? Are we better or worse off as Toastmasters when we shun the in-person meeting at which we can enjoy being social, better display body language, and use stage space, and receive continual audible and visual feedback from the audience, rather than staring at a bunch of video squares with everybody muted? Gack!

Is it just me, or can you also say, ‘I hate Zoom’?

Ah, yes. The Ah Counter flagged you at today’s meeting with ample “ands” and so many “sos.” Shame on you–right? Perhaps. Let us, as speakers and Ah Counters, learn when to know when these two words are used rightly, and wrongly as filler words.

Recognize that both are conjunctions. For those of you whose English class was a long time ago, “Conjunctions connect other words or groups of words to one another.”¹ Specifically, they are coordinating conjunctions, in that when properly used they “join equivalent structures–two or more nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, phrases, or clauses.”² Do you remember the Schoolhouse Rock video, “Conjunction Junction?” Watch the three-minute video, again or for the first time, to learn about “hooking up words and phrases and clauses.” Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AyjKgz9tKg

Let us first consider an example of proper and improper use of the word “and.”

Proper example: Joe was a contestant in the International Speech contest and the Tall Tales contest. “International Speech contest” and “Tall Tales contest” are “equivalent structures” in that they are both contests. This contest and that contest.

Improper example: I went to the store yesterday. And I decided to park in the nearest spot. While not grammatically incorrect in the purest sense, simply beginning a sentence with the word “and” is, here, superfluous. Why not simply say, in the second sentence, “I decided to park in the nearest spot”? Some speakers use a string of “ands” to link sentence after sentence after sentence, and that’s what the Ah Counter should ideally listen for. The solution? Insert a period!

Let us turn our attention to “so.” The conjunction “so” can connect independent clauses only. An independent clause can stand alone as a complete sentence.

Example: Betty opted to work four ten-hour days, so she gets Fridays off. The two independent clauses here are “Betty opted to work four ten-hour days” and “She gets Fridays off.”

A fellow Distinguished Toastmaster has suggested that if the word so in one’s sentence can be replaced with the word therefore, it is a legitimate usage. I am not sure if that is all-encompassing, but it seems to be a reasonable metric.

Two definitions of so as a conjunction that should prove helpful:³

1. in order that (often followed by that). Example: Look before you cross, so (that) you won’t get hit by a car.

2. with the result that (often followed by that). Example: He spoke loudly, so (that) everybody heard him.

I hope that you are better attuned to the proper and improper occurrences in your speeches and those of others of “and” and “so” such that you will properly use them in their proper function as conjunctions and avoid the ire of your meeting’s Ah Counter.

1Lunsford, Andrea, and Connors, Robert. The St. Martin’s Handbook. New Yor: St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1989. 148.

2Ibid.

3https://www.dictionary.com/browse/so.

We Toastmasters know what Table Topics is, how it helps participants improve their impromptu or extemporaneous speaking skills, and that a Table Topics speech, like any other, should ideally have a clear introduction, body, and conclusion (i.e. be structured).  However, I have witnessed on many occasion the Topicsmaster, after introducing the session, simply asking for a volunteer.  Sometimes one of the people who volunteers already has a major speaking role.  Is this the best way to handle a Table Topics session, or can we do better?

Let’s first address the question “Do I call on people or ask for volunteers?”  I have no recollection of ever in my time as a Toastmaster seeing an official resource which recommended solicitation of volunteers.  If you examine the resources on the Topicsmaster role description page on the Toastmasters International Web site (https://www.toastmasters.org/membership/club-meeting-roles/topicsmaster), you will find “call on” in many places.  The “Tackling the Topicsmaster Role” article linked from that page helps us further determine if calling on attendees or asking for volunteers is the way to go, by saying, “If you ask for volunteers, people who are shy may be reluctant to respond.  And those who jump at the chance often need the least practice.”  I have also noticed that when people are reluctant to volunteer to take a question there’s a delay that slows down the meeting and creates an uncomfortable awkwardness.

Great! We’ve seen that the Topicsmaster should call on attendees rather than asking for volunteers.  We therefore now need to answer the question “Who do I call on?”  I have a crack grammarian [Janet] in my club so I should note that “Upon whom do I call?” would be grammatically correct.

I developed a chart for use by the Topicsmaster.  I have included it below so you can use it as the basis for a chart for your club.  Bill Brown, in the article “Being the Best Table Topicsmaster” linked from the page above, has a multi-column list that he prepares.  He also clearly states the rationale for the highest priority entry in my chart below being an “experienced member with no role (to demonstrate)” when he says, “Give them [guests] an opportunity to see how it is done before inviting them to participate.”

Prioritized list of people to call on for Table Topics

Highest	Experienced member with no role (to demonstrate)
	Willing guests
	Experienced members with report-only role (timer, ah counter, grammarian) or introductory role (quotemaster/tipmaster, jokemaster)
	Prepared speech evaluators
	General evaluator
	Toastmaster
	Prepared speakers
Lowest	Table Topicsmaster

In conclusion, whatever list or chart resource you prepare, make it available to all members (we keep ours on our club’s FreeToastHost site).  Members, especially those serving for the first time as Topicsmaster, need to know that they should, 1) Call on people, and 2) Call on the right people in the right order.  I believe that if you implement these recommendations, the Table Topics sessions in your club’s meetings will be the best they can be.