Over his office door, storied New York Times language columnist William Safire had a sign: “Abandon ‘hopefully’ all ye who enter here.”

It’s an allusion to the words above the entrance to Dante’s Inferno: “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”

But because that was written before I was born, and you know what I’m trying to say when I misuse “hopefully,” you’re, like, old and boring me when I’m trying to text Rachel.

The day started well, with my dentist, Dr. Katz, taking me up on my suggestion to play “Memories” (from “Cats”) over the intercom in his waiting area as an “oral/aural” – ha, ha – gag, and laughing at both my “I have an inconvenient tooth” and “You can’t handle the tooth” puns. When he took an impression and I said it was more of an imitation than an impression, he smiled in a patronizing if dismissive way and said he’d use it.

Then the trouble started. I went to the grocer’s for some tooth-friendly food, and asked for “pitted olives.” The bilingual deli maven pushed the packaged scoop over the counter. They had pits. I said, “No pits.” He said “unpitted”? I said, “When I want a chicken without bones, I say, ‘boned,’ not ‘unboned.’ ” He said, “What do you say when you want shrimp without veins? ‘Veined’?” I said, “De-veined.” He threw me a knowing and contemptuous glance, and I skulked to the register.

When I got home, Rebecca was watching HGTV, where they seem incapable of describing a home or its features without using the five words “nice,” “very,” “just,” really,” and “wonderful.” For example, while a couple first sees, let’s say, new bathroom shower tile: “It’s just really wonderful, and very, very nice.”

Same for Antiques Road Show: “What you have here is a very wonderful, really nice manuscript of 20 of Shakespeare’s lost plays. Do you have an idea what they’re worth?”

Then, on the late night sports wrap-up, a local athlete got involved with the law, and said things like (paraphrasing): “I exercised poor judgment.” “I made bad choices.” “I put myself in the wrong position at the wrong time.” (Workshop exercise: Substitute the name of a famous criminal like Hitler or Manson or Madoff as the speaker for those quotes, and start laughing.)

Does anyone ever speak concretely and frankly any more? In a parallel fictional bizarro world, someone else in the same position as that athlete might have said something like this: “I was drunk. I beat up a helpless old cab driver for fun. I ran away and got caught. I think my talent and money make me privileged and better than the fans who pay my salary. I’m an arrogant celebrity, and being famous – for anything – is all that matters in America. My PR rep told me to read this, and in a week no one will remember my victim’s name.”

In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit he got off a classic – if unintentional – oxymoron: “It was a pretty ugly scene.” “Pretty ugly” – good one.

This is all by way of prelude to the NFL season. The Bears look great. Cutler under center.

But the NFL season is also “Death to the English language” season, so I’ll run linguistic interference in this blog. My pet peeve (We live in a city apartment; it’s the only pet we can keep) is the dangler: “Talking with Coach Smith in practice this week, he mentioned . . . .”

“What dangler? You’re old and boring me and you know what I’m trying to say. Rachel?”

Basta! Stop the madness! Rage against the machine!

Usually, when Jim’s phone rings, our future client on the other end wants to do something quick: to launch a new publication, or an intranet, or a CEO blog, or a video series, or an all-employee meeting to support some initiative.

The classic mistake for communicators is precisely that: to leap to tactics, especially when there’s some urgency from an internal sponsor. But all successful communication begins with one act, the same act: listening. Do what Jim does: Ask your internal client these four simple questions (with follow-up), and the vehicles will be even better.

1. What’s the business case? What goals are you trying to meet: cost reduction, innovative products, employee retention, profitable growth? In this economy - in any economy - knowing what business goals you’re supporting is the only way to align your work with the CEO’s agenda to prove your worth and get the resources you need.

2. What sorts of information do the employees want? What do they need to understand about this? How will they know what they’re supposed to do, to change the way they work? What’s in it for them? What motivates them? Where’s the pain or fear?

3. Are you sure you know what vehicles your internal audiences prefer – and which messages go in which vehicles? Are you sure? Have you asked them – both qualitatively, in focus groups, and quantitatively, in surveys? Do you know which vehicles different demographic groups want? You want a Sharepoint site – do they? Your CEO wants to blog, but will anyone read it and respond? You want to kill print? Not so fast, Johnson. Print is back, but in a new role; that’s in response to employee demand.

4. How will you know if your communications are working? What does “working” mean? How will you measure? When? What will you measure? Outputs – or outcomes?

If you can put the answers to those questions in a plan and execute it, you’ll be on your way to creating real value for your internal clients and your organization. These conversations take Jim and me only about an hour; the relationships that result can last years.

Listen: Try it.

I travel a lot as a consultant, so people tend to ask me where I’m off to next.
Over the last two years, my answer more often than not would have been one word:

Topeka.

That typically brought one of two reactions:

1. “Oh. Um. Sorry. That’s too bad.”

2. “Topeka? What is that, like, Kansas?”

Let me come clean: When we first got this gig, I thought exactly the same thing. Kansas? Isn’t that a flyover state? Topeka? It’s not exactly Paris. It’s not even the Paris of the Plains.

But as it turned out, Topeka was a pretty nice place to be—and to work. At least in this case, familiarity did not breed contempt. It bred, well, familiarity. And friendship. And now that we’ve finished our work in Kansas, I’m actually going to miss it. A lot.

Cindy Crescenzo and I spent nearly two years working with the Kansas Department of Labor. We were hired to provide communications support for the agency’s big IT overhaul, designed to improve the way Kansas delivered unemployment insurance benefits and other services.

That was the first problem. Cindy and I didn’t speak IT. We didn’t know an Operational Level Process from a Business Transformation Project.

Scarily, we do now.

Problem No. 2 was that the agency had taken on this massive remaking of itself and its processes with very little in the way of internal communications. No intranet to speak of. No print pub. No organized way of conveying information and understanding through leaders and managers.

That turned out to be the good part. Working for the Kansas Department of Labor allowed us to showcase what communications can really do to help an organization meet its goals.

And that’s what we did: We listened to employees, managers and leaders. We wrote a communications strategy where none existed. We built a SharePoint site that is evolving into the agency’s employee intranet, and we launched a print publication to explain the complexities of the project. We developed road shows and other tools to assist executive and manager communication. We introduced blogs, podcasts and online video to try to connect with as many people as possible. And we measured it all to see what was working and what wasn’t.

Lest you think it was communications nirvana, it wasn’t. At times it was hard and difficult and frustrating, just like any other communications endeavor.

But here’s what I really won’t miss about going to Topeka:
• The 4:20 a.m. wakeup to make the 6 a.m. departure on Southwest.
• The one hour and 15 minute drive between the KC airport and Topeka.
• The basement dungeon at 1309 SW Topeka Blvd., where we were first assigned.
• The Statement of Work. (I read it. I just couldn’t fathom it.)
• The Amerisuites hotel, which thankfully upgraded to a Hyatt Place about halfway through our tenure. Wine bar!

What I will miss:
• Dinners and cocktails with Cindy at “Johnny Carino’s.”
• The “Indian place” for lunch.
• Janna at the Alamo counter at the KC Airport.
• KCMO, 94.9, playing Kansas City’s Greatest Hits.
• KU vs. KState. (The Kansas version of Sox or Cubs.)

And, of course, I’ll miss the communicators: Beth Martino, who hired us and went on to become Deputy Secretary of Labor and then press secretary to the Kansas governor; Annie Patterson (now Flachsbarth), the pride of Washburn University, who was a newbie out of school when we first met her and is now a communicator par excellence.

Megan Ingmire, who took over as communications director at a critical point in the project, and who may be the only person I know who can make a podcast about an IT project sound like something that should come in a plain brown wrapper.

Kathy Toelkes, the new communications director: calm, smart, funny—and ready for anything. Sue Henke, who somehow knew everyone at the agency and knew all that was going on, without ever leaving her desk. And the designers, Connie Hammond and Linda McAndrew, who as it turns out, has a nickname (Throat Dog). And yes, there’s a story there.

Two years. Dozens of plane rides. Thousands of hours. On our last day in Topeka, Cindy and I finally did what we had talked about doing since we arrived in the summer of 2007: We went to the Brown v. Board of Education museum.

That’s right. The very school that led to the historic 1954 Supreme Court decision to end racial segregation in public schools is right there, in Topeka, not far from that basement full of IT people.

The museum was really well done, and quite moving. And when we finished our tour, Cindy and I climbed into our rental car, turned KCMO up high and drove to the Kansas City airport one last time.

No one chooses to be in our profession: strategic communications, for some organization.

We wanted to be - what?: a novelist, priest, playwright, scholar, teacher, doctor, a journalist?

We backed into it, our job; we discovered it, created it. By necessity – or chance.

What did you want to be? How did you choose this profession – where you’ll spend most of your time (other than sleep) between graduation and retirement?

Here’s how I did.

During my last semester as a professor of the Humanities at The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1979, a first-year student gave me her ticket to the Michigan/Ohio State game in response to my admiration of her hair, blacker than the raven's wing.

But – it was a Freshman's ticket, in the low corner of the visitors end-zone. Because I was leaving the academy for a career in business in Chicago (Ragan Communications with 8 employees around 1981), I thought: "What would it be like to see one game from the perspective of the coach, the storied Bo Schembechler - opposing his own mentor: Woody Hayes?”

I envisioned Michigan’s cheerleaders and marching band at my command. (“If you want to lead the band,” I recalled, from an undergraduate aphorism, “you have to face the music.”)

So I worked my way up through the Sophomores and across the Juniors, down through the Seniors and Alums, until I found myself standing in the aisle on the 50-yard line, tenth row, next to the best seat in the biggest stadium, with its six-figure+ seating capacity, the year’s best game.

It was unoccupied.

A lovely octogenarian next to the open aisle seat, her silver and gold hair still radiant in the late-autumn mid-afternoon Saturday Michigan sun, with classic chiseled features, draped in blankets and shawls and a tam of maize and blue, said: "Would you like to sit? Watch the game with me?"

I said: "Would I? Yes. I would.” After an awkward introduction and silence, I said: “But this is the best seat in the biggest stadium for the most important game of the year. Why is it vacant?"

She said: "That was my husband's seat. We met here in our '20s - and during the nation's '20s. The Roaring '20s. We were students. It was grand, that first night, in the arboretum. We lost our virginity together. We fell in love and got married. He went into college administration. I became a professor - Biology. Our children were born here; all of our friends and colleagues live here.

"Over the years, we never missed a home game and we’ve built up our seniority, so that now we have the best seats in the best stadium, for the best games - in the country."

"That was my husband’s seat. But he died.”

I said: "I'm sorry. But can't the people you mentioned - your family, colleagues, friends, and so forth, come to these games with you?"

And she said: "Well, sure. But they're all at the funeral."

I knew then, that it was time to leave. Maybe try something new. Move to Chicago. Meet some girls. Answer an ad in the Trib. Edit the Ragan Report.

Everybody’s got an airport story. Stuck here, delayed there. Tired, sweaty, angry people pushing and shoving. Crabby airline employees. Cheap bar booze.

This is not one of those stories. This is about two Southwest Airlines employees, Becky and Heather, who made sure I got home.

It happened two weeks ago. All I wanted to do was fly home from Kansas City on the 6:40 p.m. It’s a one-hour flight, and one I’ve made dozens of times in the two years we’ve been working with the Kansas Department of Labor. Piece of cake.

And I really needed to get home, because the next day I had to turn around and fly to Dallas to work with our friends at Frito-Lay.

It was not to be. While K.C. was sunny, the air was heavy and sticky, the kind that Kansans know all too well.

Twisters!

Still, our flight was on time, and as the plane took off I settled into my seat and dug out my last Southwest drink ticket for a glass of wine. (Why am I always down to my last ticket?)

We were cruising right along when our captain came on the intercom to tell us that we were actually heading south, to Oklahoma, to make a giant, sweeping turn around a nasty band of weather pounding the midsection of the country.

There were the usual groans, but what can you do? This trip would just take a little longer.

Make that a lot longer. About an hour later we began our descent—into St. Louis! Chicago was shut down, our pilot said, adding that we were also out of gas.

No grumbling this time. By all means, my good man, pull over at the nearest filling station. And be quick about it.

In St. Louis, a few people decided to get off the plane, but most of us stayed, and less than an hour later we were back in the air, heading for Chicago and home. We were 25 miles from Midway Airport and starting to descend when things took a bad turn.

It got real bumpy, with lots of lightning out the windows. I should have been worried, but my brain does weird things in tense situations, and on this occasion it decided to focus on the theme song from Gilligan’s Island.

The weather starting getting rough, the tiny ship was tossed.

(Everybody) The Minnow would be lost. . . .

Not to worry, the Skipper called out. We’re going to Indianapolis. And so we did.

That’s when I met Heather and Becky. They were working the B3 gate when we all stumbled out of the plane. It was 12:30 a.m. They greeted us warmly, then they went to work.

Since the airport was closed, they asked the ground crew to bring out some extra snacks, soft drinks and waters. Then they immediately began working on alternatives for everyone.

We had two choices:
1. Bag it. Get on a fight the next morning, go get a hotel room and grab some sleep. More than a few people decided to do that.
2. Hang tough. We might still get this plane out of here, they told us.

I decided to wait, still hoping to get home in time to grab a few hours sleep and then catch my morning flight to Dallas.

And Becky and Heather were right there with me. We talked. We told jokes. We looked at the weather on the radar. By around 2:30, we still thought we’d get out.

Then the storm that was eating Chicago hit the Indy airport. Hard. A voice on a loudspeaker told us that the control tower was being evacuated.

Chicago suddenly seemed very far away.

And still Heather and Becky stayed. They made sure everyone got on a morning flight and were still there when their relief came. Just before they left, around 5:45 a.m., I bought Heather a cup of coffee. She handed me my boarding pass and gave me a big hug.

The ultimate in face-to-face communications.

Thanks for playing with us, Heather and Becky said to me as they were leaving, at least five hours after their normal shift had ended. We’ll see you again.

“Hey, this was so much fun I’ll be here tomorrow,” I said. “And I expect to see both of you.”

A flight attendant standing nearby jumped in: “It is tomorrow.”

I turned to Becky and Heather. “See?"

This just in from a colleague and alumnus of the Ragan Fellowship program: A query from a freelance writer seeking “business words” to help re-educate stay-at-home moms and dads who are rejoining the work force.

That’s right. This writer wants to help returning workers get up to speed by teaching them how to speak mumble mouth.

“There is an entire language in the business world . . . ,” she writes. “I’m looking for a business ‘language lesson’ of some of the basics.”

In other words, jargon. Crapola. Ca-ca. Communicators spend every waking hour trying to rid their organizations of corporate-speak, and along comes someone who wants people to relearn this nonsense so they can fit in at the office.

Some of those words, our correspondent confides, make her cringe when they are used incorrectly, “though they are acceptable to those in the workplace.”

“Words like ‘effort’ in place of ‘try,’ as in ‘I am efforting a solution to that problem.’”

Efforting a solution? That’s acceptable to people in the workplace? Not to anyone I know.

But what the hell. If this writer thinks that men and women trapped in “Kidspeak” need a refresher, I’m only too willing to help. Here’s my quick tutorial of stay-at-home speak turned into flowing, gurgling corporatese:

1. “Time to go beddie-bye.”
“We’ve got some surplus capacity we need to re-engineer to position ourselves for positive growth.”

2. You ate every bite for papa! Such a big boy.”
“I am continually amazed at the wealth and talent we have in this organization.”

3. “Mommy wuvs her little boopsie.”
“People are our greatest asset.”

4. “There, there. Shhh. It’s OK. Mommy’s here” (best accompanied with patting and burping).
“We face some unique challenges and opportunities in the near term” (best accompanied by liquor).

5. “Did someone go poopies?!”
“I see that you’re efforting a solution to that problem.”

Welcome back, people. And stay out of my sandbox.

This week, we’re hosting our Corporate Communicators Conference in Chicago. It’s our most important event of the year. We do everything we can to make it the best professional advancement experience.

People come to Chicago, to the conference, to attend the events and listen to the experts described in the brochure. To see Chicago. To renew friendships. To learn new methods.

Whether or not you’re coming, it raises an interesting question: How can you get the most out of a conference?

Well, I’ve been to a number of them and, for me, they’re best when I:

1. Come in a little early, a day, to get settled and scope out the setting: the hotel, the city. I don’t like to show up tired and crabby and confused.
2. Review the materials, the schedule, and get my own agenda ready.
3. Hook up with colleagues from previous conferences. Everyone always says that the social aspect of event was a highlight. We’re a profession, a community of colleagues. So e-mail them and make your plans.
4. Meet the speakers, before or after they speak: Trust me: They want an ongoing relationship
5. If you’re there to learn, Write during the sessions. Four Latin aphorisms have stayed with me since my seminary days. The first is: “Qui scribit bis legit”: The person who writes, reads twice. Heighten your active learning by taking notes.
6. The second: Laugh: “Castigat ridendo mores”: “Laughter succeeds where lecturing won’t.” In favorable reviews of presentations, one of the most common notes is: “I liked his sense of humor.” Well, how about yours? Attendees should try to make others laugh.
7. The third is Teach: Share your own knowledge: “Docendo discimus”: “We learn by teaching.” Do you come to a conference to learn? Then teach others what you know, what’s going on in your organization. You’ll learn more if you do.
8. Finally, Experiment: Try new things, or try familiar things again. Don’t say, “We tried that before and it didn’t work.” Don’t say: “That’s not our way.” Take the risk: “Quae nocent docent”: Things that hurt teach. No risk, no innovation. Failure is what every successful person does right before success. Edison and the light bulb.

In the Consulting Group, Jim and Katrina and I say that communication is everyone’s responsibility. That goes for a meeting, a conference, a webinar, a workshop – those are all forms of communication. Their success, in part, is the teacher’s or presenter’s responsibility. But also, perhaps in greater part, the student’s or attendee’s responsibility.

I’m not sure attendees or students get that. I think, too often, they just show up. There’s a certain knack to teaching a workshop, leading a meeting or conducting a conference session. The greater gift, I think, is knowing how to take responsibility for attending one.

As baseball season begins (the crack of taut horse-hide on polished ash), I sometimes think of the observation by ex-jock announcers of current rookies: “His future is all ahead of him.”

Communications is about hope, the future, helping our organizations meet their goals. When Jim and I conduct strategic communication planning sessions, we often engage participants in a “SWOT” analysis of the communication department’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

Except we make it a “SWTO” analysis, to end on the note of optimism, the future, “opportunity”.

I once read in an essay by Woody Allen, referencing another, more intimate, context, that nothing is sadder than a missed opportunity.

An anecdote to illustrate the point:

Last Oct. 30, Jim and I were in Dallas, and, because it was his birthday, we went out after work for one perfect martini, before dinner with the client/friend. The waitress, a bright, literate, engaging young woman, talked us into a martini with blue cheese-stuffed olives on a stick.

They were so great we asked her, with her intelligence, presence, communications skills, etc: “Why are you waitressing?” She told us she had just graduated from SMU (Southern Methodist University) with a degree in corporate communications and was looking to find a job.

We told her that, coincidentally, we work for Ragan Communications, the oldest and largest company in the profession, with information sites, conferences, training, consulting, even a job site specifically designed for recent grads like her. We told her that our social site, myragan.com, had a networking group for recent grads.

Could we give her our e-mails and review her resume, or the addresses of our sites?

She smiled, as if we two older men were trying to make small talk, seemed completely distracted, pre-occupied and busy.

Few people get a job because a career counselor gives them a resume template or their parents tell them they’re special. It’s usually a connection; sometimes, a chance connection. Much of life happens by chance encounters.

So Jim and I went off to his birthday dinner with our client – our favorite client.

It was great. We’re too old to miss an opportunity.

See you behind the Hertz counter at DFW, sweetie.

Before “What’s your sign?” the great conversation starter was “Have you read any good books lately?” Or: “If you could take only one book with you to a desert island, what would it be?”

That gave way to “Have you seen any good movies lately?” And today: “Have you made any good movies lately?”

Evidently, people still read books they hold in their hands and turn its pages, though Kindle may well become this year's anniversary gift of choice in a certain blogger’s marriage.

But my point is that “Books I have read” is one of my favorite Profile categories in our sister social site, myragan.com. The maddening response, of course, is “Too many to list.” Obviously, the point of the category is to advance the networking goals of the site, and let’s hope anyone who makes her or his living with language has a certain depth to the bibliography.

It’s like a visitor asking us what our favorite Chicago restaurant is, and our saying: “Oh, there are too many good ones to mention.” That’s true, but not a conversation starter.

The person who posts “I’ve read too many books to mention” simply wants the Profile visitor to know that he or she is literate.

And that’s my point: The handful of books we reveal as having most influenced us is an index to our identity. It’s a glimpse inside us – and intimacy makes us uncomfortable.

One of our consulting colleagues –Katrina Gill, an expert on audits – asked me on a road trip last year what I was reading, and I told her the truth: “The Joy of Cooking” as prose and the “Catholic Catechism” for its structure. I think the candor of my response may have cemented our friendship.

On myragan.com, three of the best-read people in our company offered the following responses to the category.

• CFO Kevin McMurtrey gives it up for Henry James, Anthony Trollope, C.S. Peirce, Winston Churchill, and others. There’s more to Kevin’s life than numbers.
• myragan.com editor Michael Sebastian clearly understands the point of the category and cites “Of Human Bondage,” W. Somerset Maugham’s semi-autobiographical masterpiece on personal triumph over social resistance.
• Language columnist and managing editor Rob Reinalda’s tastes are eclectic, but run to the masters of the novel and the play: John Irving, Vonnegut, Salinger, Dickens, Shakespeare, David Mamet. Fiction and drama for Rob.

My point is this: Those books we’re willing to admit publicly as having shaped us tell others – strangers – as much about who we are as our resumes. Probably more. The great 20th century Canadian literary scholar Northrop Frye wrote that all of Western literature is about one theme: the individual’s quest for identity. In revealing what we’ve read, we reveal what we’re looking for, the person we’re looking to become.

Twenty-eight years ago when I interviewed for my job, Larry Ragan’s first question was “Tell me the last three books you’ve read.”

Thank God they were by Faulkner, Küng and Shakespeare, or I’d be selling men’s clothing (my other job offer) today.

So – those of you who wrote on myragan.com (and other visitors, of course) that you’ve read too many books to list, let’s have your favorite book of all time here. And, more important – why: what it says about who you are, or who you’re looking for.

What does this means for communicators? Try this: If readers are going to get anything out of the story, they must also see themselves in the story.

I’m a nut for endings. Hellos are easy. Goodbyes are hard.

In our previous blog, Jim illustrated the importance and types of leads. I couldn’t agree more. Unless people read, nothing happens.

But if they read – what happens next? That’s an important question for us in strategic communications: What do you want them to do after they read? And if first impressions are lasting, lasting impressions can point to new beginnings.

So: How do you conclude? What do you want them to do after they read? Leave them with that lasting impression.

To pick up Jim’s examples:

Leads:
They can be simple and declarative: Call me Ishmael (“Moby Dick,” Herman Melville).
They can offer great insight to come: I am an invisible man (“Invisible Man,” Ralph Ellison).
They can be playful and teasing: All this happened, more or less (“Slaughterhouse Five,” Kurt Vonnegut).
They can even get us all hot and bothered: Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins (“Lolita,” Vladimir Nabokov).
They can be intriguing: All children, except one, grow up.
Endings:
Endings are harder, because of the information, plot, analysis, understanding, and so forth that come between the lead and the ending:
Here are the endings to the leads presented above:

On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan. (Melville)

On the lower frequencies, I speak for you. (Ellison)

Birds were talking. One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, 'Poo-tee-weet? (Vonnegut)

I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita. (Nabokov)

When Margaret grows up she will have a daughter, who is to be Peter's mother in turn; and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless. (Barrie)

The simplicity, insight, and intrigue that Jim rightly points out as the wellsprings of drama in the leads can become complex, resigned, and ambiguous by the endings.
But in every case, the lead points, like a vector, to the ending.
So, in our more business-like writing, the point is that the lead predicts the change after the story.
• If you begin with conflict, end with resolution
• If you begin with a question, end with an answer
• If you begin with a problem, end with the solution
• If you begin with “then and now,” end with “next.”
And today, always end by inviting reader response.
Sure, we sit down to write full of hope, purpose and energy. So leads must be great. But by the time we get to the end, exhausted and under deadline, we forget to tell our readers what they should think, do, or feel.
Please send us your best last sentences.