Monday, April 30, 2007

Just As Well I Don’t Live In a Glass House.

There is an old saying that he who lives in a Glasshouse shouldn’t throw stones. I f I didn’t know why before, I do now.

Recently I wrote about the importance of properly using a person’s name. Well I recently wrote to a friend of some little time and used the abbreviated form of her name, which would not have been a problem in the slightest, but it was when I spelled it incorrectly and when used in reference to her response to the above mentioned article.

Now I suspect that normally she would not have responded but as I had written about it previously she felt the need to correct me and to keep me to practicing what I preach.

So what warnings can we all learn from this? Well the most obvious one is to practice what we preach, even to the point of learning which of the half dozen or so spelling variants their name may have. (In my case I have no real excuse as despite the many variants there are, I had her own preferred version written before me on her e-mail.)

The next is simply a version of the old axiom, “To stop and smell the roses.’ It is a simple fact but sometimes we just try to do too much at the one time which means we tend to rush things or simple glance at things and think we have understood all that was there when in my case I obviously hadn’t.

The final point that I wish to emphasizes is that even if we do get it wrong occasionally, there is no need to give up just because we make the odd mistake or two.

So if like me you don’t always, “Practice what you preach”, it doesn’t mean you have to give up “Preaching”. Just that you have to take a little more care and do it right to start with.

What say you? Walter.

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