I almost let this Wednesday get by without a Wordly Wednesday post!

Visit the links for a little Wednesday Wordplay!

http://wordsmith.org/anagram/advanced.html

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/

http://www.wordspy.com/

http://www.wordplays.com/p/index

Know of any other great wordly websites?  Leave a comment and leave a link!

Thanks to @lilithsaintcrow I was recently introduced to six word stories.  The concept of the six word story has been around for some time, but it was new to me.  If you’ve never heard of the six word story click here for an introduction and some wonderful examples!

For today’s Wordly Wednesday I decided to try my hand at writing my own.  It was so much fun I wrote several, six to be exact, which seems somehow fitting.  Don’t you think?  I’m calling it my creative writing 6×6.  I’m posting them here and will also be posting them on Twitter throughout the day with the tag #sixwordstories.  Use it to follow along or use the tag yourself and post some of your own.

My six word stories:

1. A dozen roses; hopeful promise, undelivered.
2. Honor student: Drunken driving, thus interred.
3. Grassroots effort.  Rally’s over.  Now what?
4. Headline wrong.  Lives destroyed.  Retraction buried.
5. Fallen angel: Will work for food.
6. Left for church.  Got lost.  Introspection.

There are lots of places where you can share your own six word stories.  Here’s a link to one to get you started.  The best six word stories will appear on site’s front page and be posted to their Twitter feed.

If any of my six word stories inspire you to write a larger work based on it, leave me a comment and let me know.  I’d love to hear about it.

Have fun!

The importance of the words we use in everyday communication could hardly be understated.  While body language, context, vocal intonation, pitch, etc. are significant factors in interpreting intended or implied meaning, the words themselves are the common-language root of our vocal communication.  For people in the hearing impaired and Hard of Hearing (HOH) community, however, understanding spoken words can be a constant challenge.  While they may get the gist of what someone else is saying, much of the nuance, and at times the actual content of the message, can be lost in translation.

My wife and son are both hearing impaired and utilize digital hearing aids programmed for their specific hearing losses.  My wife relies heavily on speech reading in certain situations to augment the words she doesn’t clearly hear, even with the use of her hearing aids.  Unfortunately, all the digital technology we’ve tried hasn’t bridged the gap of talking to other people on the telephone with confidence, as the other person isn’t present to speech read.  For obvious reasons, the idea of something as simple as making a routine telephone call can create some unnecessary anxiety.

What to do?  Enter CapTel.

For those who may never have heard of CapTel it’s a service which allows anyone with difficulty hearing over the telephone to receive a word-for-word transcript of the conversation, live.  I first learned about CapTel from an advertisement in Hearing Loss magazine for Hamilton CapTel, a transcription app for the iPhone which works with the CapTel service.  My wife, however, isn’t a big gadget fan (unlike me!) so the iPhone option was out.  Thankfully, we found that Sprint also offers Sprint CapTel, (aka WebCapTel).  All you need (other than a telephone) is an Internet connection and a web browser.

A GREAT concept!  Sadly, the reality is not so great.

You can use the links above to learn more about how the whole process works.  For now, I wanted to share wife’s most recent experience using it.

Below is a the actual text rendered by WebCapTel during a recent call my wife made to her Audiologist’s office, Advanced Audiology.  She got the answering machine, but here was what WebCapTel told her was being spoken on the recording.

(Recording) Hello Thank-you for calling advanced ideology the opposite of Doctor Carey Hill are office hours are Monday through Thursday 9 am to 5 pm the office is closed daily from 12 2 2 pm please neither name for number and a brief message and we will get equity as soon as we can Thank-you have a great day at the tone …

In case you missed it, below is the same transcript with boldface added to highlight the translation failures of the system.  You can figure out for yourself what was actually recorded in the message:

(Recording) Hello Thank-you for calling advanced ideology the opposite of Doctor Carey Hill are office hours are Monday through Thursday 9 am to 5 pm the office is closed daily from 12 2 2 pm please neither name for number and a brief message and we will get equity as soon as we can Thank-you have a great day at the tone …

WTH?!? How is THIS any better??? My wife can do better than this, unamplified, through speech reading alone!

Now don’t get me wrong.  I don’t expect any automated system to provide 100% accuracy when doing speech-to-text transcription.  However, with CapTel the transcription stream is supposed to be reviewed by a trained captioning agent (whatever that is) to make necessary corrections in real time to ensure the text matches what was actually said by each participant on the call.

Incidentally, the other, unadvertised *feature*, is that the text appears several seconds after the words are spoken.  Presumably, this is to give the captioner time to clean up any translation errors before they’re displayed.  Well, not in this case.

It’s difficult enough for those with disabilities to use some of the basic services, like the telephone, that those without disabilities take for granted every day.  If a company is going to provide a service which promises to bridge that gap, it would be nice if they would actually deliver.

But perhaps in the instance, as with many, you get what you pay for.

For Christmas last year my wife bought me a copy of a The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises From Poets Who Teach.  It’s a collection of essays and exercises intended to challenge and inspire writers (not just poets) at all literary levels.  I’ve only recently begun to work my way through it.  Typically I can only make time to do this when the hopper managing my ‘free-time lottery’ kicks out the writing self-improvement ball.  Unfortunately, this number must be improperly balanced as I don’t see it very often, but for the times it has, when I’ve reached for this book, I’ve found it to be a useful resource for helping me ‘go deeper’.

One of the first exercises (okay, THE first) is from author, poet and essayist Ann Lauterbach.  In it she challenges readers to consider their first memorable encounter with language, either written or spoken, and then to describe their experience of it.  Was it exciting?  Enlightening?  Confusing?  For me, my earliest, most powerful language memory was made while riding the bus in early elementary school.

I typically sat in the first or second row of the bus near the driver.  Mounted in the right beside the HUGE mirror the driver used to monitor any and all activity on the bus, was a black metal sign stamped with large white letters which read, “Do Not Stand Forward of Line While Bus is in Motion.”

The first time I noticed the sign I was already a decent reader.  I was able to get every word on the sign except ‘Motion’.  I kept hearing it in my head as “mott-ee-un” and no matter how I tried it, I couldn’t figure out what a “mott-ee-un” was.  Ordinarily, this would be no big deal, but since I rode the bus twice a day and every time I glanced forward it was there staring back at me, I couldn’t avoid seeing this message I simply couldn’t understand.

I inevitably spent each bus ride trying to puzzle out its meaning.  I even found myself reciting the words, including the unshakable “mott-ee-un” mystery word throughout the day.  (A bit obsessive I’ll admit.)  Nevertheless, the longer this went on the more I secretly began to worry that maybe this was something I was supposed to know.  Surely whoever hung it so prominently in the front of the bus must have thought what it said was important, right?

The day I finally figured out the last word I remember feeling a bit surprised at myself and strangely disappointed.  I knew what ‘motion’ was and I used the word, I just didn’t recognize it printed, but I’d been staring at it for so long I was expecting something more from it.

Still, even after I’d *mastered* the sign, I couldn’t get the words out of my head.  I kept wondering why the person who wrote it wrote it the way they did.  If the idea was to keep kids from tumbling down the steps while the bus is moving then instead of writing ‘Do Not Stand Forward of Line…’ why not write ‘Stay Behind Line…’.  And instead of ‘While Bus is in Motion’, why not “Until Bus Stops’.  Or better yet, a much simpler and more direct version of the entire thing, ‘Stay Seated Until Bus Stops’!

As a first memorable encounter with language, this one turned out to be one of my most formative.  I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t drawn to consider the subtle ways in which word choice, even word order, in a sentence can so drastically change its tone and its intended or implied meaning or as in my bus riding example, actually obscure the meaning altogether.

I suppose it would have been much easier if I had simply asked someone to tell me what the sign said.  (For the life of me I still don’t know why I didn’t.) But in retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t. We learn so much more from our mistakes and from grappling with life’s questions for ourselves than we do when anyone, even with the best of intentions, simply gives us an answer.  The real value in the struggle is not getting to the right answer in the end, but it’s in how the effort to find it shapes us and makes us into better versions of ourselves, whether we ever find the answers we were looking for or not.

So what was your first encounter with language like?  How did it affect you?

Post your comments and let me know!

I’ve always believed words have much more power in them than most people are willing to give them credit.

With that in mind, I broke new personal ground today by starting my own Wordly Wednesday "thing" (how’s that for a use of words) on Twitter.  Search: #wrdw.  For starters, I’ll be taking an often misused word I hear during the week and crafting a Tweet about it.  I’m not sure how this will turn out or how long it will last.  Consider it an experiment.  My first #wrdw Tweet was this morning.  Go and have a look.  :)

How ironic then that a coworker today posted these powerful words on his corporate blog. Unfortunately, they weren’t attributed so I can’t give proper credit. I wish they were mine, but they’re not. {sigh}  Anyway, here they are:

Watch your thoughts, they become your words.

Watch your words; they become your actions.

Watch your actions; they become your habits.

Watch your habits; they become your character.

Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.

There’s nothing more to say.