At My Earliest Convenience

I can neither pinpoint the origin nor attribute the first use of the expression "at my earliest convenience." 

But I can say with authority it makes me scream to hear it.

And I hear it all the time.

Sure, common expressions regularly creep into the nonsensical, and no one bats an eyelash.

People once said, "I couldn't care less," to express indifference. 

Now they say, "I could care less."

They say "irregardless," when there's no such word.

They say "my kids' PJs are inflammable," unaware they're upsetting child protective services.

Those slips are innocuous.

But this bastardization of language is different.

It's tactless, malicious, officious and moronic. Obnoxious. Inhospitable. Boorish. Befuddling. And most of all, belligerent.

When did it creep into use? 

And why didn't somebody stop it?

When I hear "at my earliest convenience," I hear "me, me, me—it's all about me."

Screw you.

The blog Grammarly would excuse innocent users of the expression, claiming the phrase "sounds impolite" but hardly amounts to a "grievous business faux pas."

Wrong.

It's a grievous business faux pas. 

Use of the phrase should be punishable by imprisonment.

Recurring use, by hard labor.

 

Customer service in America has already tied for last place with customer service in Stalinist Russia. 

In the present environment, I don't need to hear that you'll get back to me at your earliest convenience. 

That says "never." 

As in, "Get lost. Take a hike. Go, and never darken my towels again."

Grammarly recommends business people who use the phrase "at my earliest convenience" alter it slightly to be more specific. 

"Please leave your name and number and I'll get back to you within 178 hours." 

I recommend they go jump in a lake.

Now. 

When it's convenient to me.

The customer.

POSTSCRIPT FOR EMPLOYERS: Create a document for your employees like the one found here. Threaten them with dismissal for any use of "at my earliest convenience."

Free Lunch

There's no such thing as a free lunch.

— Milton Friedman

Pioneers of the "loss leader," late-19th-century saloonkeepers offered thirsty customers "free lunch."

Economist Milton Friedman popularized the term a century later by propounding that "there's no such thing as a free lunch." (He didn't coin the expression. He swiped it from critics of the New Deal.)

But when it comes to tasty business clichés, Friedman was wrong. 

Below is a free smorgasboard of them.

We use them every day. 

Who'd have thought what these terms originally meant?

Across the board. In the 19th century, racehorses' odds were displayed on "tote boards" (huge calculators) at the track. When a gambler wanted to back a horse to win, place or show, he placed a bet "across the board."'

The Big Cheese himself,
William Howard Taft

Big cheese. In colonial India, Hindus used the word chiz to mean "thing." British soldiers simply added "big" when a thing was important. The term wasn't applied to people until 1911, when President William Howard Taft appeared at the National Dairy Show in Chicago, where he was invited to slice up and sample an enormous wheel of cheese. As a result, the 350-pound Taft became the world's first "big cheese."

Coach. In the 19th century, you took a coach when you wanted to get somewhere fast. Schools began to use the term to denote tutors, who accelerated students' learning.

Dead wood. Shipbuilders in the 16th century often placed loose timber blocks in the keel of a ship as ballast. Sailors called the excess cargo, which slowed the ship down, "dead wood."

Even steven. The first Afrikaners called an English penny a "steven." When they settled a debt, they would say they were "even steven."

Facilitate. In the 13th century, English speakers borrowed the French verb faciliter, which means to "ease," and turned it into a noun. Facility meant "gentleness." If you're gentle, you don't boss people around. You coax them.

Guinea pig. When a Brit volunteered for jury duty in the 18th century, he received the nominal sum of a guinea a day for his time. If he longed for better pay, he'd join the King's Navy, where a "Guinea pig" was a novice sailor.

Hard and fast. An 18th-century ship that was stuck was "hard." A ship in dry dock was "hard and fast."

Irons in the fire. To do the job right, a 14th-century plumber had to keep several hot irons at the ready all the time. How else can you connect lead pipes?

Draco

Kill with kindness. The Ancient Greek lawmaker Draco was beloved by Athenians. To prove their adoration, they showered him with their cloaks—too many cloaks—when he appeared at the Aeginetan theater in 590 BC. Poor Draco was smothered. What a way to go! (I almost said "What a way toga.")

Lame duck. An 18th-century member of the London stock exchange who couldn't meet his obligations on settlement day was said to "waddle" out of Exchange Alley, mortified.

Mentor. Before he left home for the Trojan War, Ulysses chose his friend Mentor as an advisor to his son Telemachus.

The naked truth. An ancient fable holds that Truth and Falsehood went for a swim. Falsehood stole Truth's clothes. Truth refused to take Falsehood's clothes, and so went naked.

Okay. Like President Trump, Andrew Jackson couldn't spell. On day he spelled "all correct" as "oll korrect." The misspelling became an acronym that political enemies seized on, in order to mock Jackson. The gag worked, because "OK" rhymed with the Scottish expression "Och aye," meaning "Oh, yes."

9th-century taxpayer

Pay through the nose. In the 9th century, Ireland was occuoied by Danish invaders. The invaders placed a much-hated real estate tax on the Irish that was known as the "Nose Tax." If you failed to pay the ounce of gold due, the Danes slit your nose.

Take a rain check. Baseball first became popular to watch in America in the late 19th century. You received a voucher, good for future admission, any time a game was called on account of rain.

Skin in the game. Australians called an English pound a "skin" in the early 20th century. Gamblers liked to "put skin in the game." In a so-called "skin game," innocent players were cheated by sharpers.

Tip. In the 17th century, English speakers borrowed the German verb tippen, meaning to "touch," to denote a "gift." Your could make a gift of money (a "tip") or a gift of information (also a "tip"). The story about signs over tip-jars reading "To Insure Promptness" is pure baloney, invented by cartoonist Robert Ripley.

Upper crust. Pies were symbols of society in the Middle Ages. The top crust represented the aristocracy.

Wild Alpine Burdock

Velcro. Swiss engineer George de Mestrel invented Velcro in 1941, after noticing that the burrs of the wild Alpine burdock stuck to his pants. He named his invention after velours crochet, French for "velvet hook."

Worth your salt. Ancient Roman soldiers were paid monthly, sometimes in money and sometimes in salt. Their allowance was called a salarium. Sal is Latin for "salt."

Yahoo. Before the search engine, Yahoo was the name of a race of louts, "the most filthy, noisome, and deformed animals which nature ever produced." The novelist Jonathan Swift dreamed them up when penning Gulliver's Travels in 1726. In 1995, the search engine's inventors borrowed the name, because they thought Swift's description of the Yahoos also described them.

Goodly. "Goodly" combines good with -ly. It was coined by yours truly in 2016 ("Bigly" was already taken). So now you know.

19th-century racetrack "tote board"

Death in the Afternoon

Anxiety is there. It's only sleeping.

— Martin Heidegger

I'm amazed people watch Hallmark Christmas movies in July—or any time of year.

Psychologists agree these sappy romances release dopamine, but that doesn't wash for me as an explanation.

Psychologists also agree our pattern-seeking brains savor the movies' carbon-copy plots. That sounds better, but doesn't go far enough.

Why do people watch Hallmark Christmas movies in July?

To keep death at bay.

As Sigmund Freud observed, death threatens us from three directions all the time: from our own bodies, doomed to dissolution; from the external world, rife with destruction; and from other people, prone to violence. 

On top of those things, we harbor an unconscious "death wish" that compels us to take foolish risks.

In the face of the threats, we're driven to escape, to experience Nirvana or what Freud calls the "oceanic sensation" of eternity.

And that, I believe, explains the appeal of Hallmark Christmas movies.

They all take place in a delusional fairytale land where no one suffers, no one dies, and nothing ever changes (except the casts, and they all look alike).

I recall from childhood devout Catholics who attended mass every day in hope of earning "life everlasting." 

In its unwavering consistency, the Catholic Order of Mass is like a Hallmark Christmas movie. But for the cast, nothing ever varies.

But old-fashioned exuberance for church-going has become quaint. 

In fact, church attendance in all denominations is cratering.

Now to keep death at bay we just turn on the Hallmark Channel. And we do so with urgency.

"If you think it through," Martin Heidegger said, "life can beautifully be called 'urgency.' But you must then agree that life's essence comprises desire, sorrow, and death—all at the same time."

When you acknowledge death is inevitable, your existence is torn in two, Heidegger believed. 

While you enjoy life's little pleasures, you can't help but be aware that time is finite and that your will has limits—even though your desires do not. 

So you waste time in flight from your awareness of death: you dissociate, daydream, drug, drink, overwork, overeat, overpost... or just dial up the Hallmark Channel. 

Then things aren't so dismal.

How Could They?

Have not other nations found great benefit from the use of slaves in repairing high roads, making rivers navigable, draining bogs, and erecting public buildings, bridges, and manufactures?

— George Berkeley

Happy Juneteenth! 

What better day than today to ask, how could White Christians have enslaved Blacks and still believe they were practicing Christians?

I think it's smart to look for answers in the writings of the most thoughtful Christians of the period.

One was the Irish philosopher George Berkeley.

A brilliant and outspoken Anglican bishop (and a slave-owner, as well), Berkeley shared the belief with many of his White contemporaries that obedience to God demanded you support slavery, because it was good for the slaves.

Berkeley was as conservative as they come, and not much different from today's conservatives in believing some people are bums. 

Skin color didn't much matter to Berkeley: bums in the 18th century were all the same. God made them that way.

Berkeley worried a lot about poverty and unrest in his native Ireland and in 1735 wrote The Querist, a book in which he asked, who's to blame for the fact that Ireland is poor?

His answer was clear: the bums are to blame.

Bums represented to Berkeley a dissolute, drunken, cynical, lazy and antisocial form of life. 

Forcing bums to participate in infrastructure projects was better than leaving them at liberty to wallow in their own filth. 

Forcing them to work would, in fact, give them dignity and guarantee their personal development.

If compulsory labor made them slaves, so be it. Slaves, as the Bible made clear, are just servants. Turning bums into servants served the public good, stimulated the economy, and was the "best cure for idleness and beggary." Forced labor, in fact, was a bum's way of demonstrating his or her "Christian charity."

Berkeley could justify an institution we find repugnant, because he valued an orderly Christian society—one that curbed some individuals' liberty, when that liberty hampered self-improvement.

We might call it charity under the lash, or self-help at the barrel of a gun. Whatever you call it, you know Berkeley's argument is weird and deeply flawed.

But it sounds hauntingly familiar.

One Job

Is leadership possible without a purpose larger than ambition?

― Doris Kearns Goodwin

When my last manager drove me to quit a great company, little did I know I was in the majority.

Only six months later, Gallup asked a million employees why they'd quit their jobs and found the Number 1 reason to be the manager.

Seventy-five percent of employees who quit did so from sheer contempt for bossypants.

My manager was pretentious, narcissistic and bewitched by her own—and her betters'—power. She was a vestige from an acquisition and completely unlike her home-grown, more admirable, peers. I was unlucky enough to work for her—until I quit. It was a hard choice, but unavoidable.

A manager has one job. One. That's to, as Jean-Luc Picard always said, Engage!

The managers who shouldn't be managers don't get that. They can't. They only get blind ambition.

But ambition has nothing to do with being a manager.

Manager, meaning "one charged with conducting a house of business," came into English from the Italian maneggiare in the 14th century. Maneggiare means "to handle," especially with regard to teams of horses (maneggiare came the Latin manus, meaning "hand").

A manager acts as the "hand" that guides the business. 

She's there to direct work, neither "hands on" nor "hands off."

Her handiwork should be to engage, not to command, demand, or reprimand; and certainly not to manipulate, mandate, or manacle. More like to emancipate—in Latin, "to take someone by the hand."

"People leave managers, not companies," Gallup concluded from its million-person study.

When will companies come to grips with that?