 Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, as the case may be. I'm James Randy. As an educator, I'm very much aware of the single most important factor that differentiates our species from all others. The ability to communicate verbally or by writing so that we may be in touch with past or future generations of our kind. We've learned to examine records left to us by previous inhabitants of our world as well as to create our own records for those who will follow us. Back in the 1930s, a somaticist named Alfred Krasinski invented a term for this ability. He called it time-binding, and I find that to be a very good expression for this valuable function. This is why I believe that our language skills should be carefully controlled and restrained, used with great care. Meanings are often confused and lost between individuals and cultures. A minor and relatively unimportant example of this is the different terms that the English have for various parts of an automobile. They have a boot, a lorry, and petrol, where we have a trunk, a truck, and gas, but I hardly think that this will lead to war or to a trade embargo between the UK and the USA. What I'm really concerned about here is how careless we can be and are in our everyday conversation and in our advertising. Take this example. This is something that popped up in my mailbox just today. It advertises that these folks are offering me natural chicken. And I really have a hard time imagining an unnatural chicken. Does it involve some moral turpitude on the part of the bird? Was the creature created in a laboratory rather than by natural and traditional means? Should this foul be featured on an FBI bulletin? Of course, the intention of the advertiser probably was to ensure potential consumers that no growth hormones or antibiotics were used in raising the chicken. And that is a reasonable enough statement because such chemicals should be used minimally, if at all. However, that term natural is so overused. It appears on packaging and in TV ads very frequently and serves as a generally comforting word to the unwary because as I've often said, gravel and bird droppings, as well as belladonna and stricten, are also natural. Yet I do not consume them. Just this morning I heard a weather forecast on TV warning that a warm front was approaching and could drop a ton of moisture on us. Well, first of all, I'm thoroughly bored by weather forecasts, especially when the meteorologist goes into rhapsodies about low pressure areas and high-altitude jet streams, as if he or she is trying to give us a crash course in meteorology. But the approximate weight of the amount of water that will be precipitated is far more information than I'd like to have or need. Oh, yes, I understand that this is only an expression, but it's a careless one. I hear the same term being used by economists like a ton of problems, for example, and by would-be Martha Stewart's as, you know, a ton of flavor. And I'm quite certain that these items are not thus measured. Redundancies, you know what I mean, references to rich millionaires, stupid superstitions, and self-serving politicians are increasingly popular errors of speech used by newscasters. Recently, I heard references to a plummeting drop in prices, what are they're kind, and the current political uncertainty of today, da, and to a deadly fatality. This sort of usage appears to be an attempt to emphasize an expression, but it fails. And if I hear once more a reference to a definite fact or an unfortunate tragedy, I just may give up viewing TV for at least the next 20 minutes. I note that persons being interviewed on the NBC Today show almost invariably begin every single response with the word, well, the grammatical function of that I'd be hard-pressed to define, and these folks also seem to have forgotten how to pronounce the simple word, yes, using instead the word, absolutely, as if to assure the audience and the interviewer that there is just no other possible affirmative answer. Of course, the word no is equally neglected, being replaced by absolutely not. Fewer things than they might imagine are absolute in any respect. And have you noticed prices of merchandise and services seem to always end in nine? A monstrous piece of machinery was offered for sale just last week on television at a price of $499.99. Now, tell me, is there anyone who would choose to believe that this is not $500? Consider, that saving of one cent amounts to one-fifty-thousandth of the price. Wow, such a bargain! Yes, we're familiar with paying gas prices like $1.99 a gallon, saving one-two-hundredth of the price, and perhaps pretending that it's not $2. But is anyone fooled into celebrating the saving of one cent, perhaps twenty cents, on a fill-up? I ask that question quite seriously because highly-paid ad executives seem to think that they are. Bottom line, despite improvements in communication skills, we still have Sylvia Brown and John Edwards speaking to dead people, quacks shaking up homeopathic compounds while shaking down the suckers. And some naïfs out there still believe that a certain conjurer with a four-trick repertoire can bend spoons with his thoughts. Certainly not a skill that has brought us anything in the way of a benefit. Any more than breaking light bulbs would make our lives better or richer. Finally, as a careless flaw in our use of language, I'll mention the speech item that particularly irks me and has heard very often here in the USA. It's the term, you know, inserted every few words by sports figures, politicians, and so many different people in so many different circumstances. I once recorded a telephone conversation with the permission of the caller, of course, and I later played it back to him, asking him to count the number of times he'd dropped in a, you know, as a sort of punctuation to his narrative. He listened to four minutes that I'd selected from the recording and announced a total of eight times that he'd used the expression. I then replayed the recording for him, indicating by a rap on my desk each time that I heard the phrase. He had actually said it 18 times, not eight, but it had become such a part of his speech pattern that he simply didn't notice it. Other offensive phrases of this kind are I mean and like, randomly dropped into conversations, ad nauseam, far more often than we think. Well, that's today's tirade and I hope that you feel thoroughly scolded. I think we do well to pay more attention to what we're really saying and what we're really trying to express so that our communication can be more useful to all of us. Like, you know, I mean, I'm James Raddy and I thank you for the use of your screen and your time.