Tuesday, May 23, 2017

“Trying to Remodel the Kitchen While You’re Also Cooking Thanksgiving Dinner”; “Powerful Women are like Napalm to me”; “the Picasso of Passive-Aggressive Karate”--Use of Visual, Evocative Expression to Emphasize One’s Point

[Rewritten July 31, 2017]

Here are some recent examples of highly effective communicators using a vivid, evocative expression while emphasizing something and thus making their assertion indelible--examples which, I hope, will inspire the rest of us into similarly imaginative analogies, especially when we are trying to break through the clutter.

  • Discussing the steep challenges being faced during the construction of an all-new terminal complex at Salt Lake City International Airport, their Director of Operations, Peter Higgins, telling PBS’s “Nightly Business Report” earlier this year: “In many cases--airports particularly--you end up building on the same footprint you're occupying. So, oftentimes, you're trying to remodel the kitchen while you're trying to cook Thanksgiving dinner!
 
  • [From my 2014 archives.] In response to Charlie Rose’s comment “You also create good roles for women,” famous movie director David O. Russell saying: “Yes, powerful women have become the napalm to me as a filmmaker...Melissa Leo in ‘The Fighter,’ Amy Adams in ‘American Hustle,’ Jennifer Lawrence in ‘Silver Linings Playbook’ and ‘American Hustle’... Powerful women who can clean your clock in a way you never see coming. They can surprise you; they can, as Irving (Christian Bale’s character in ‘American Hustle’) says of the Jennifer Lawrence character: ‘She was the Picasso of passive-aggressive karate.’ I love every aspect of (Jennifer and Amy)--from the glamor to the rawness.” 
   
© Copyright 2017  V. J. Singal

 

Monday, May 15, 2017

Vocabulary Expansion Words: New Edition of “Words of the Month”

Just realized that I had not announced in this blog the last edition (March/ April 2017) of Words of the Month,” my free vocabulary enrichment feature. It has been online since the end of March. Here are the six featured words, all of which lie within the conversational vocabulary of America’s most articulate (as is the case with all of the words featured in my book, The ArticulateProfessional-3rd Edition”): 

1. tribune
2. vapid
3. redolent
4. sophomoric
5. mendacious
6. vivify