“What we have here is failure to communicate. Some men you just can’t reach.” Those memorable words were uttered in the 1967 movie “Cool Hand Luke.” Uttering them was the late Strother Martin, one of the American film industries great character actors, in the role of “captain.” On the receiving end of the captain’s wrath was the late Paul Newman, the very incorrigible “Luke.”
Those few words have taken on a life of their own. I’ve applied them to a lot of situations where I have been the giver or the receiver of the failure — sometimes both in the same situation. As an aside, in this great movie I found Luke’s eating 50-hardboiled eggs one of the best scenes of any movie I’ve ever seen.
As a headline to this Corner, I played around with: “Too much chatter, too little communication.” Either headline sums up well my thoughts about my coming to — or not coming to — grips with all the elements of the modern age of communication where there seems to be a lack of person-to-person communication. I admit that there are good things happening in the world of communications out there in the ether that I have failed to come to grips with: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
American folk singer and Nobel prize laureate Bob Dylan let us know back in the 1960s that the times they are a changin’. Perhaps I didn’t heed his warning enough and there are occasions when in the world of ether-communication I’ve been sinking like a stone.
In the world where I grew up, people wrote personal letters, cards, notes and even some homework assignments in cursive — oftentimes with an ink-filled fountain pen. One time back in the day (what the hell does that mean, when was it?) I sent a complimentary hand-written note to a grandchild; it had to be translated. How many of our elementary schools still teach penmanship?
As for what you can do with a pen as a writing tool, consider the late Shelby Foote, a noted historian: using a steel-nibbed dip pen, he wrote a three-volume history of the Civil War.
Attending a Catholic school, I grew up with the Palmer Method of penmanship; my wife Bea, attending a public school, learned the Zaner-Bloser Method. Incidentally, at about this same growing-up time, we both learned to tell time on an analog clock or watch. Back in the day, a quality wristwatch or fine fountain pen (maybe a Parker 51) was often given as a high school graduation gift.
Handwritten communication has pretty much been replaced by such tools as email and text, with such messages often being shortened and sent quickly and often with little attention to punctuation, spelling, and grammar. These tools are also often used in place of a telephone call. However, as of late I see a reluctance of people and businesses to provide a telephone number where they can be reached. If you want to reach them, you’re forced to communicate electronically.
I admit that I’m a bit of a dinosaur in this age of whiz-bang technology. I do have a home computer and can do most of the basic things it is capable of doing. Bea and I do facetime with our children and grandchildren on a regular basis. I’m not on Facebook. I do use the computer as a way to keep up on the news and to find encyclopedic and other general information on a variety of subjects. Often very handy when I’m cobbling together a column.
In the world of hand-held communication, I still have a flip-phone, which I use for sending and receiving voice messages. I very rarely send or receive email or text messages. I remember one phone conservation in which I was seeking some numbers needed for I story I was working on. The person I was speaking with started to say she would send me a text; but I heard a voice in the background saying, “Don’t send him a text; he never reads them.”
In my work as a reporter, I like whenever possible to do a face-to-face interview, or in lieu of that a telephone interview. Occasionally when I contact a person for an interview, I’ll get a request to email the questions I want answered. I won’t do that; that’s not an interview. While a reporter should not come to an interview with any trick or gotcha questions for the interviewee, he and the person being interviewed should welcome some spontaneity should it arise.
Decades ago, when I was a journalism student at South Dakota State University, I asked one of my instructors if the modern tools of the trade made for better writing. His response was a sort of “maybe… but.” The bottom line: If you can write, the tools are incidental; if you can’t write, all the whiz-bang technology in the world can’t make you a writer.
As for voice communication via in-person or telephone, there’s got to be a reasonably good grasp of the English language as we speak it here in the colonies. When it comes to interviews, I especially enjoy talking to veterans. We can employ the military phonetic alphabet, which can spell things out with clarity and brevity. It also allows for some very expressive language that covers a lot of situations: WHISKEY-TANGO-FOXTROT-OVER (WTFO) is a fine example; so too is TANGO-UNIFORM.
If you need any help in further translations of the above, give me a call at the Reg: 605-692-6271; or if you must, email me at [email protected]. No texts, please.
Take care. Stay safe. Have a good day.
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