An entrpreneur friend of mine shook his head the other day as we discussed the admittedly-not-man-bites-dog case of a Cook County government worker doing a half-assed job.

"It takes just as much effort to get out of doing work as it does to just do the work," said my pal. "So why not just do the work and get some satisfaction too?"

Government workers aren't the only people who ought to be forced to answer that question, if only for themselves. This time of year, especially, we see the emergence of the Corporate Clock & Calendar Watcher, deeply engaged in everything but the work itself.

Signs of the CC&CW:

• He starts telling you in e-mails to have a "happy holiday" or a "great holiday vacation" weeks before the holiday. (Just as he has been telling you all year, starting on Wednesday, to have a "fantastic weekend.")

• With predictible regularity and all possible haste, she moves every work conversation from work stuff to personal stuff—kids, sports, what you did last weekend—which serves the dual purpose of getting you to stop talking about boring work stuff, and reminding you (especially if you're the boss) what's really important.

• He's been organizing the office betting pools for March Madness since before it was called "March Madness."

• She never misses a meeting, even those she's told are optional. She also bitches about how many meetings there are, but if she were ever excused from one, would then bitch about being out of the loop.

I'm going to come up far short of suggesting that these dead-wooders be cut loose. I happen to believe every organization needs a certain percentage of semi-engaged workers just like every human body needs some fat, every brick wall needs some grout.

I chortle at the notion of the poor CEO who thinks he wants all his employees champing at the bit, but who would commit suicide if he had to deal with all those go-getters going off in all those different directions. I also agree with Ragan's late founder Larry Ragan, who once declared that to be "dedicated" to some jobs—that was the term for "engaged" 30 years ago—was to be certifiably insane.

I don't envision a society where every last laborer is whistling while he or she works. Hell, I don't pretend to always whistle while I work. At this very moment I'm having a fierce internal debate about whether to pitch a horribly ambitious (and horribly timely) magazine story, or: "Honey, I bet they have egg nog at the store by now. Let's get a gallon ...."

So it's a complicated subject. Still, I do delight in identifying the chronic CC&CWers among my business correspondents, especially this time of year when all of us are having that feeling a bearlike urge to shut things down and hibernate for the winter.

What are your favorite Signs of the CC&CW, in others (or in you)?

Larry Ragan wrote that we generally seek more of what we already know—if we're Irish, we watch movies about Ireland, if we know about cars we read car magazines, if we're liberal we read liberal columnists.

It's a sad but true law of communication.

But I've never heard of a creator of communication discouraging all but the like-minded from hearing the message. Until I ran across this bio this morning, from a blogger:

"I am the mother of a soldier, who's been to Iraq FOUR TIMES. We live in the midwest. These are my views, and I'm entitled to them in spite of the liberal thought police who are trolling conservative blogs. So if you have a problem with a traditional Christian worldview, move on."

And move on I did. But I wonder what she hopes to accomplish with the blog if she expects only people who agree with her to read it. Her note is a an unwitting anthem, is it not, for general lack of interest, these days, in communicating with "the other side." These days we're, each of us, seemingly content merely to charge up our base.

Well, not this Liberal Thought Policeman—not most days, anyway. (And not my pal Jane Greer, either.)

When the communication corner of the blogosphere erupted a few years ago, I figured speechwriters, those chronic byline piners, would be the most enthusiastic celebrants. Alas, there are only a few speechwriters' blogs.

There's Hal Gordon's blog, for Ragan.

HP speechwriter Ian Griffin does a blog, too.

Freelance Jane Genova blogs on speechwriting here.

U.K. freelancer Brian Jenner blogs.

And maybe there are one or two other regularly updated speechwriters' blogs that I'm forgetting (I hope you'll weigh in in the comments).

But I'm here to announce a very humble, very handy new blog, introduced to me yesterday by veteran speechwriter—we're talking a 25-year veteran of the CEO speechwriting wars—Pete Ryckman.

Called "Memo to C-Level Speakers," the blog addresses execs directly, and offers well-written advice on speaking style and content. Typical of Ryckman's early entries:

***

We've all been in an audience that's built a double-course, concrete block wall between us and the speaker. Nobody is paying attention. We've tuned out. People do e-mail on their BlackBerrys. They talk to each other. Everybody feels trapped. Lucky souls near the back or the sides wait for a pause so they can break for the door.

We've also seen the opposite. We've been in audiences that turned the wall into a superconductor. The room is filled with electricity. Big energy flows back and forth between speaker and audience. Sometimes the energy is positive. There's laughter. People nod in agreement. Sometimes the energy is negative. The audience is restless and edgy. People interrupt with questions and challenges to the speaker. But it's all good. The speaker and the audience are connecting. They're having a real-time dialogue. It's working.

***

Want to know how to avoid the former scenario and make the latter happen? Read Ryckman!

My pal Tony Judge points me to the gallery section of of Fred Thompson's campaign Web site.

Hell, cancel the primaries and give Thompson the nomination now. These people can't be stopped!

In a discussion of an article on Ragan.com, commenter Matt Greenberger brought a fresh perspective to the complex but dog-eared question of Which Is Better—Written Communication or a Face-to-Face Talk?

"In my experience," Greenberger said, "there's nothing inherently distant about good writing, and nothing essentially intimate about face-to-face meetings."

Greenberger, you've got a point.

Anybody interested in the Mitt Romney's speech today and how it compares to Kennedy's effort in 1960 can hear it from Ted Sorenson's mouth.

After 15 years of covering the speechwriting community, I finally came to a loose philosophy on whether speechwriters should remain anonymous.

I articulate it here.

Do you agree?

When I was a little kid I spent a lot of mental playtime trying to think up word combinations—my favorite was "who dog think martian wait"—that I was reasonably sure had never been uttered by anyone else in the world.

Now I spend my lots of time thinking up word combinations, for Google searches, that have been uttered by others.

This irony occurs to me, and I type into Google, "who dog think martian wait."

And a blog entry comes up. To my relief, it's an entry I wrote a couple of years ago.*

I wonder, though, what's more mentally and emotionally healthy: A life spent searching for original phrases, or a life spent trying imagine how others have described the things I'm searching for?

* I wrote it on another blog that's now captained by Hal Gordon, so my entry has his mug on it, much to Hal's embarrassment I'm sure.

For all the smoke rings we've all blown in recent years about fancy communication strategies and measuring ROI and the like, the most reliable way to get communicators yaking is to mutter a half-formed observation about words, and stand back. (See my last post as evidence.)

A better formed opinion about words is that: Lots of perfectly good ones are disappearing, for reasons logical and mysterious.

"Butterfingers." We don't cook anymore, and so we don't have a name for somebody who can't catch a ball.

"Palaver." Perhaps we didn't need this one, but anybody who's ever read about an H.L. Mencken palaver with George Jean Nathan wishes palavers weren't entirely things of the past.

"Smarts." As in, "ouch, that smarts." Ask anybody under 35 about that usage and they'll look at you blankly. Which will smart.

Bet you don't know what it means to "get your ashes hauled."

"Saloon." My friends Tony Judge and Ed Reardon were the last two men in the world who refered to bars as "saloons." And Eddie died in August.

We're losing a hundred agriculture-based expresssions like "make hay while the sun shines." If you don't know anything about hay, that expression makes no sense.

Similarly, how would a twit who grew up on Nintendo have any idea why we old blacksmiths need to "strike while the iron's hot"?

My friend Bill Sweetland hits a bad golf shot and calls himself a "nitwit." The day Bill quits playing golf (or learns to stop swinging so fast from the top of his backwing), "nitwit" disappears from the American lexicon.

These words—especially for word people—are the connection not just to our own ancestors, but to all of history, and I for one stubbornly cling to these babies.

There are many more. Let's think of them, and start using them in our everyday conversations, stiffly at first, until they finally catch back on.

* Thanks to Jane Greer for headline.

There's a long Murray rant on Ragan.com—yes, I'm still screaming about that ethics-of-photo-doctoring panel I was on back in June.

But one response to that diatribe, from Shades of Gray regular Susan Cellura, made my day. In respone to my remark that some communicators contribute to the corporate instinct to turn people into unfeeling drones, Susan wrote, in part:

"I am proud to say that I don't hide my identity while I'm at work. And it shows in the creativity I bring to my projects. I laugh hysterically at jokes I think are funny. I delight in creative, intellectual articles. I scour the web and blogs for more ideas. My colleagues and I do the 'happy dance' in the hallway when we have a success."

Let's all try to be more like Susan in '08, shall we? And if it makes some of our colleagues nervous or freaks management out?

As my mother would say, "Fuck them if they can't take a joke."

Yes, she did. The boss of a close acquaintance of mine flew in the sales team and read aloud, from cover to cover, while showing the pictures, "The Little Engine That Could."

C.S. Lewis once envisioned an afterlife in which we simply become more and more like ourselves. For some people that would be heaven, Lewis pointed out, and for others it would be hell.

I have a related theory about why so many people say the holidays are "depressing," when the "holidays," as we know, have done nothing wrong and can hardly be blamed for our depression.

What the holidays are is a big referrendum on the failures of the last year, and a handy context for long-term anxiety about the perils of the next.

To the extent that we are displeased with our lives we say: "Another year has gone by and I'm still .... (fat, underpaid, smoking cigarettes, working in a dumb job)."

And to the extent that we love our lives, we worry: "What are the odds that I'm going to get through the next 365 days without a massive setback, if not a huge tragedy?"

(One hungover New Years morning I tried to distract myself from these grim thoughts by turning on the TV. But all the cable news showed were the tsunami wave washing tourists away from sunny beaches.)

Now, you could say that instead we ought to use this milestone to celebrate our every success from the last year, and to reflect on all the exciting prospects and good news the next year could bring.

But most don't do this. Instead, we turn toward one another darkly and say quietly, "I don't know. I think the holidays are kind of depressing, don't you?"

In my ongoing attempt to record all known laws of communication, I share this one, from my favorite Chicago columnist, Sun-Times smartass Neil Steinberg, about readers and mistakes:

"And permit me to let you in on a secret, something I've learned through 25 years of professional journalism and believe in my heart of hearts: The more upset a person is by a supposed error, and the greater the compressed zeal released in leaping to correct this 'error,' the higher the likelihood that it is not an error at all, and that the complaining person is actually wrong."

What are your wise communication laws, readers?

Some Shades regulars unite to write a piece, "Do's and Don'ts at the office holiday party." It's at Ragan.com.

The formation of this informal "Women of Like Minds" group reminds me of The Association of Women in Communications, which goes back to 1909 and used to be more prominent than it is now. But has a slick Web site and claims to have more than 4,000 members.

I'm going to check in on these folks after the new year and see why they're the best kept secret in the business.

(Or are they?)

Got an e-mail yesterday, subject line, "An Open Letter from the CEO."

I had to open it to make sure it wasn't from Mark Ragan. It wasn't. It was from Leslie Dickson, the CEO of some outfit called VoicePro®.

I started to read it:

"As I reflect back on 2007, I am continuously awed by the challenges our clients face on a daily basis. For example, being constantly expected to do more and more and more with less and less and less."

Is Christmas coming, or the Apocalypse?

"Never-ending cuts to staffing, fewer financial resources, and more importantly less time to get it all done. The stress levels are at an all-time high and the confidence levels seem to be at an all-time low. But still, everyone carries on with the business of the day."

In other words, the band plays on. What kind of cheerful holiday message is this?

"We at VoicePro® are grateful to have been able to work with you this year to help build your strengths and maximize your efforts, while giving you options to minimize any weaknesses. We are dedicated to all of you and will continue to help you succeed and prosper."

Succeed and prosper? Weren't we just talking about dwindling resources and plummeting confidence?

"And, I want to personally take this opportunity to thank you for helping support my busines. It is through clients that we at VoicePro® grow and learn."

(CEOs are forever talking about "taking this opportunity to" thank people, aren't they? Just hurry up and thank them!)

"I am excited about 2008, and look forward to some new and significant offerings for you, our clients and friends, to try out. We will be launching some initiatives that will provide additional help for you to deal with the 'lack of time' issue that just will not go away soon. We will also be giving you additional tools to be successful in your work lives, as well as in your daily lives. We want to help you show the world that you have important things to say."

I'm still wondering what this company does, and for whom, and why I got this letter. They're certainly not maximizing my efforts and minimizing my weaknesses, though come to think of it they might be secretly doing the opposite.

"So, here's to strength, confidence, authenticity and fun for the coming year!"

Oh boy: You know when CEOs are writing about it in their annual holiday letter, the short-lived "authenticity movement" has come to a premature and unhappy end.

You heard it here first.

I'm tying up loose ends and preparing to go off the grid for a couple of weeks. My friend Tony Judge seems to be a couple of steps ahead of me. He's sending me e-mails like this:

"If you were a flu symptom, wouldn't all this noise about 'flu-like symptoms' just gall you?"

And—separate e-mail—"How do you think sleet and freezing rain feel about becoming a 'wintry mix'?"

I've got to get to the place where Tony is.

I'm working on it.