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This blog is called A Few Kind Words because the word kindness originally meant being kin, or kindred, or of the same kind. And since we are all humankind, we should remember to be kinder to one another when we communicate. The alternative is to be unkind, to use language which fails to connect or even alienates. The choice isn't hard.Twitter Updates
- RT @NicolaSturgeon: Well that was a privilege - talking to Arundhati Roy about her novels and essays, winning the Booker prize, India, Kash… 6 hours ago
- @edbookfest @ThereseKieran not my question, I hasten to add! 8 hours ago
- RT @edbookfest: There is no such thing as a prose poem. It's just a sick joke. You are either writing poems or you are not. I can't say tha… 8 hours ago
- RT @edbookfest: Q: What makes something poetry rather than prose? Simon Armitage: Context. I'm a poet. If it is published next to other poe… 8 hours ago
- RT @edbookfest: Q: Is it possible to sum up the way we live now in just one word? Simon Armitage: No. 8 hours ago
Tag Archives: business language
The eagle
Yesterday evening I raised my glass to Rosemary Sutcliff. It was an odd moment. I was sitting on my own in the restaurant on the sixth floor of the Leela Kempinski Hotel in Gurgaon, overlooking what my driver had proudly … Continue reading
Dark Angels
Each new year John Simmons, Stuart Delves and I meet in the Scotch Malt Whisky Society’s comfortable rooms on Edinburgh’s Queen Street, as we did today. It’s our annual Dark Angels partners’ meeting. We have a bar lunch, a bottle … Continue reading
Truth in Assynt
I’m reading a beautiful book. At The Loch of the Green Corrie is by Scottish novelist, poet and mountaineer, Andrew Greig. Part memoir, part meditation on fishing and wilderness, part tribute to another Scottish poet, Norman MacCaig, it speaks to … Continue reading
Memorabilia
My maternal grandfather, a retired admiral, could recite The Hunting Of The Snark in its entirety. As a young midshipman he had committed it to memory and there it had stuck for the remaining seventy-odd years of his life. I … Continue reading
Tagged business language, corporate speak, emotion, headcount, heart, Memory, mind
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Out of the darkness
On Wednesday evening, as the Chilean miners emerged one by one from that hellish, six-hundred-metre-long metal tube, President Piñera, who seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of bons mots, declared that his country’s most precious resource was not copper or … Continue reading
Why fiction?
‘Why should I read fiction?’ This was a question put by one of our students in Spain, a couple of weeks ago. It’s a good question, and a reminder for me that not everyone has the passion for stories that … Continue reading
Dawn chorus
Finca el Tornero de Abajo is the Spanish home of my childhood friend, novelist Robin Pilcher. A chestnut farm on a hillside in the Sierra de Aracena, 100 kms northwest of Seville, it’s a place of magical light, long views … Continue reading
