Wednesday October 13

Well Toastmasters was today . . . I was the Grammarian. I'm going to be honest, grammarian is the crapiest card you can be dealt in toastmasters. It's like the Old Maid or the Queen of Spades. You have to watch for improper use of phrasing, which sucks because the only people who mess up on that are people who have English as a second language and occasionally leave things out or turn phrases improperly. Yo can still usually understand them though. Today a person left out a couple "a"s and "the"s before nouns.Big whoop. I felt bad calling her and another person out for their errors, because the peech was ultimately understandable. Then I got a slap on the wrist for mentioning them by name. Your suppose to give critics in a more general sense by saying "when using nouns remember to place "a"s and "the"s before them". But how are the specific people suppose to know you were talking about them so they can then pay attention to that the next time they give a speech? It's not like I'm calling them out saying: Epic Fail! You should give up speaking because you can't use phrases properly. We have to pay 25 cents every time we say "ummm" or "uhhh" and those people do get mentioned by name. (I'm down 25 cents today). Nobody holds it against them. It's just something they need to work on and take into consideration.

Anyways, best speeches today were Roger who gave his first icebreaker and described what it was like living in San Jose in the 50s. Apparently before Google and the internet moved in, there were a whole bunch of fruit orchards and the city was known for them. My dad often mentions that he liked hanging out in the orchards before they became office buildings. Kind of sad that we lost all that natural land and fruit.

The second speech was Jeff's. He talked about where common phrases we use today come from. Turns out Shakespeare was quite the quotist. He actually came up with the term "breaking the ice". The Bible also had some handy ones like "the blind leadingthe blind", which is interesting for reasons I won't go into . . . A lot of other phrases came from on-the-job and old habbits people used in the 1800s.