The Art of the Pithy Statement: A Club President’s Address, with Commentary

The following speech was my Club President’s opening address at AIA Toastmasters Club’s NFNF chapter meeting on 28^th January 2021.

Club members, colleagues, my fellow Toastmasters, welcome to our NFNF chapter meeting.

As we consider the events of the past year and developments in the industry, I would like us to remember that we are financial services consultants, not insurance agents.  As consultants, we are experts in our field.  As agents, we would be mere salesmen.  As consultants, we leverage our credibility to offer solutions.  As agents, we push products.  We are not here to sell life insurance.  We are here to sell the idea of what life insurance can do for people.

We are in AIA Toastmasters Club to refine that concept, so every one of you can go out and be more effective in your work.  This means moving away from presentations, and toward connecting with clients.  This means finding the right words to convey profound statements to them, so they intrinsically understand that you have their interests at heart.  They say a picture paints a thousand words.  The right word, at the right moment, in the right place, implies a universe of emotion even a picture fails to convey.  Find those words.

You could tell your clients that as long as one person – a spouse, a child, a parent, anyone – depends on their continued income, they need life insurance.

You could tell your clients that whatever excuse they offer for skipping coverage will sound selfish and ridiculous to the people they leave behind, their grieving widows and orphans.

You could tell your clients they are not buying life insurance because they are going to die, but because the people they love are going to live.  And how do they want them to live?

You could tell your clients that life insurance is a means to engage in estate planning before they have made enough money to provide for all their needs and family.

You could tell your clients that the only person best placed to take care of them in old age is the person they are now, because there are no guarantees with people.

Master the art of the pithy statement, and let clients think through the consequences of their own decisions.  Then deliver for them.  We work in an industry where we are among the few people who deliver good news while others suffer pain and loss.  That is why we invest time becoming effective communicators.  That is why we are in this programme.

Over to you, Toastmaster of the Day.

Commentary: The Distinction between Consultant and Agent is Not Semantic

The Life Insurance Association of Singapore’s own Protection Gap Study found the average critical illness shortfall per economically productive adult sits at S$264,586.  That gap did not open because agents ran out of product to sell.  It opened because too many conversations stayed transactional, closing a policy rather than building an understanding of what a family stands to lose.

Every pitch should begin with a statement that is short, declarative, and aimed at a single emotional truth rather than a feature list.  A prospect forgets a comparison table by the following morning.  He does not forget being told who pays the price for his hesitation.

An excuse that sounds reasonable to the person making it sounds indefensible to the family left holding the consequence.  A consultant softening that truth to spare a client’s feelings in the moment is not being kind.  He is deferring a considerably harder conversation onto people who will never get the chance to have it with the client at all.

Stop presenting.  Start connecting.  Find the sentence that makes the consequence real, and trust the client to conclude himself.  That is not motivational filler.  It is the mechanism by which a S$264,586 gap gets closed, one honest conversation at a time.

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Terence Nunis, DTM | Division Advisor, District 80 Division M | Club Advisor, AIA Toastmasters | Past President & Founder, Awesome Toastmasters

Google Searches for Insurance during Covid-19

Insurance is one of those things no one considers until events occur, and they realise it is actually important.  Insurance is about mitigating risk pertaining to loss of income or unexpected expenses arising from unforeseen untoward incidences.  It uses portfolio pricing to keep costs low per person by spreading the risk across a wide demographic.  Ordinarily, that is sufficient.  But in a situation such as a global pandemic, simply getting coverage becomes expensive, and underwriting becomes more stringent.  In general, we are not buying insurance because we are going to die.  That is inevitable.  We are buying insurance because people we love are going to live, and we want them to live well.

Underlying Assumptions

When speaking, it is important to not assume that the other party understands the underlying meaning, especially when they are not native speakers of the language.  Much of our everyday conversations are based on mutual underlying assumptions.  That may not work in giving instructions.  For example, consider the following: 

“My therapist told me to write letters to the people I hate, and then burn them.  I did that, but now I don’t know what to do with all the letters.”

The Speaker Intent

The British psyche is one of understated feelings.  There is this pathological need to not offend, or create drama.  This also means non-native speakers of the language miss the idiomatic intent of the conversation, and take it literally.  Language is alive, and speaker intent is more than the apparent meaning of the words. 

Defining Cousins

Culturally, a lot of people use the term “cousin” to describe various relatives without understanding what it actually means.  Legally and medically, the types of cousins needs to be determined precisely, especially concerning inheritance, and genetic conditions. 

In the lineal kinship system, used in the English-speaking world, a cousin is a type of familial relationship in which two relatives are two or more familial generations away from their most recent common ancestor.  Arabs, the Indian subcontinent, and certain other cultures, do not necessarily subscribe to these definitions of types of cousins.  People are considered related with a type of cousin relationship if they share a common ancestor, and are separated from their most recent common ancestor, by two or more generations.  This means neither person is an ancestor of the other; they do not share a parent, so are not siblings; and neither is a sibling of the other’s parent, meaning none is an uncle or aunt to a nephew or niece. 

The cousin relationship is further detailed by the concepts of degree and removal.  Degrees and removals are used to describe the relationship between cousins more precisely.  Degree measures the separation, in generations, from the most recent common ancestor to one of the cousins, whichever is closest, while removal measures the difference in generations between the cousins themselves.  The degree is the number of generations subsequent to the common ancestor before a parent of one of the cousins is found.  This means the degree is the separation of the cousin from the common ancestor less one.  Also, if the cousins are not separated from the common ancestor by the same number of generations, the cousin with the smallest separation is used to determine the degree.  The removal is the difference between the number of generations from each cousin to the common ancestor.  Two people can be removed but be around the same age due to differences in birth dates of parents, children, and other relevant ancestors.

Commas are Important: How One Punctuation Mark Rewrote a Verse’s Theology

A comma does not merely pause a sentence.  It reassigns which word attaches to which clause, which frequently means reassigning who is doing what to whom.  “Let us eat, Grandma” addresses Grandma as the listener.  “Let us eat Grandma” makes Grandma the meal.  The comma is the difference between an invitation and a confession to cannibalism.  That illustration is a well-worn teaching device rather than a historical event – hopefully.

Luke 23:43 records Jesus responding to the repentant criminal crucified beside him.  The original Koine Greek carried no punctuation at all:

καὶ εἶπεν αὐτῷ ὁ Ἰησοῦς, Ἀμὴν λέγω σοι, σήμερον μετ' ἐμοῦ ἔσῃ ἐν τῷ παραδείσῳ

Kai eipen autō ho Iēsous, Amēn legō soi, sēmeron met' emou esē en tō paradeisō.

Every comma in every modern translation was inserted centuries later by translators making an interpretive choice, not transcribing an authorial instruction.  Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, completed in 405 CE, rendered the verse this way:

Et dixit illi Jesus: Amen dico tibi: Hodie mecum eris in paradiso.

The Vulgate’s own punctuation places the break before Hodie (“today”), attaching it to the second half of the sentence, “today you will be with me in Paradise,” which is the traditional reading.  Yet the underlying Greek word order, sēmeron sitting immediately after legō soi, “I say to you,” rather than immediately before met' emou esē, “you will be with me,” has given later scholars grounds to argue the opposite attachment is at least grammatically defensible.

The Doctrinal Fork This Produced

Placed one way, the verse reads: “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise,” meaning the criminal enters Paradise that same day.  Placed the other way, it reads, “Truly I tell you today, you will be with me in Paradise,” where “today” modifies the act of speaking rather than the timing of Paradise, leaving that timing unspecified.  Most major translations, the New International Version, the English Standard Version, and the New American Standard Bible, follow the Vulgate’s placement, supporting immediate entry into Paradise at death.  The New World Translation, used by Jehovah’s Witnesses, places the comma after “today,” consistent with their doctrine that the dead remain in an unconscious state until a future resurrection rather than entering Paradise immediately.  Professor Carl W. Conrad of the Department of Classics at Washington University in St. Louis argued the Greek word order itself favours attaching “today” to “I tell you,” rather than to “you will be with me.”

A single punctuation mark, inserted by a translator with no punctuation to guide him in the source text, has shaped what millions of believers understand about the immediate afterlife.  This is not a comma correcting an ambiguous business contract, the kind of dispute that costs a dairy company several million dollars and gets resolved in an appeals court.  This is a comma deciding eschatology, embedded so deeply into familiar translations that most readers never suspect the punctuation was ever a choice at all, let alone a choice with a rival camp still arguing the other side of it, in Greek, in Latin, and in every language translated from either.

The Verdict

Every comma in every sacred or legal text carries an invisible decision behind it, made by someone who was not the original author and who may not have shared the original author's intent.  A reader who assumes punctuation is neutral, mechanical scaffolding holding up an author's unambiguous meaning has misunderstood what punctuation is.  It is interpretation, dressed up as formatting, and Luke 23:43 proves that even a single comma, absent from both the Greek original and disputed even within its earliest Latin rendering, can decide whether a man enters Paradise today or merely gets told something today, with Paradise arriving whenever the translator’s rival happens to believe it should.

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Terence Nunis, DTM | Division Advisor, District 80 Division M | Club Advisor, AIA Toastmasters | Past President & Founder, Awesome Toastmasters

Somebody Disagreed with Me Online

It helps to be passionate about what we are writing.  There is no writer more passionate than the man who is outraged by something, and has a lot of opinions about it.

Proofreading is Important

Before sending out documentation, point of sales, and public relations material, it is important to proofread.  It saves a lot of pain.

The Wrecked Tile

Presenting words in the wrong context can lead to misunderstanding.  Clear communication should never be taken for granted.

All That is Holy

The expressions, “holy mackerel”, “holy cow”, and “holy shit”, and variations of the theme are common idiomatic expressions, primarily used in American English, within a colloquial context. 

Double Positive Negative

A linguistics professor was lecturing to his English class one day. “In English,” he said, “a double negative forms a positive.  In some languages, though, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative.  However, there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative.” 

A voice from the back of the room, piped up, “Yes, right.”

Enunciate to Avoid Drama

It is important to enunciate our words.  It avoids drama.

Words That Surprisingly Do Not Rhyme or Do

The following words appear as if they should rhyme, but do not: cough, rough, though, through. 

The following words do not look like they rhyme, but they do: pony, bologna. 

Welcome to English.

Using “Shit”

The word “shit” is derived from Old English, having the nouns “scite”, meaning “dung”; and “scitte”, meaning “diarrhoea”; and the verb “scitan”, meaning “to defecate”.  “Shit” eventually morphed into Middle English “schitte”, referring to “excrement”; “schyt”, meaning “diarrhoea”; and “shiten”, meaning “to defecate”. 

The word may be further traced to Proto-Germanic “skit-“, and before that, to Proto-Indo-European “skheid-”, meaning “cut, separate”, the same root believed to have become the word, “shed”.  The word has several cognates in modern Germanic languages, such as German “Scheiße”, Dutch “schijt”, Swedish “skit”, Icelandic “skítur”, and Norwegian “skit”, for as examples.  Ancient Greek had σκῶρ, from Proto-Indo-European “sker-”, which is unrelated. 

The word “shit” is considered to be vulgar and profane in Modern English.  As a noun, it refers to faecal matter, and as a verb it means to defecate; in the plural, “the shits”, it means “diarrhoea”.  As a slang term, it has many meanings. 

When you tell someone, “You’re shit”, and “You ain’t shit”; although they are opposites, are both insults. 

However, saying, “You are not shit”, is meant to comfort and reassure. 

When you say, “You are the shit”, with the addition of the article “the”, it is actually a compliment. 

Welcome to English.

Proofreading is Next to Godliness

Proofreading prevents embarrassing hilarity.

Some Homographs

Homonyms are words that have different meanings but are pronounced or spelled the same way.  There are two types of homonyms: homophones and homographs.  Homophones have the same pronunciation, but are often spelled differently.  Homographs have the same spelling but are not necessarily pronounced the same way.  The following are some examples of homographs. 

It would take more than a minute to minute the minute details of the meeting.

But would we be content with the content?

We read what we read again to fully understand what was written.

Can we excuse the fact there is no excuse for this?

Or, we could wind this up and throw it to the wind.

Buying Flowers

Conversations in English function on the assumption that the different parties implicitly understand what the others mean since the pronouns, and verbs are not specific.

Interpreting Advise

English is the language of liars, diplomates, and poets.  One word or turn of phrase can be understood in multiple ways.

English Happens

Kenneth Macrae MacLeod, the Scottish science fiction writer, wrote, “Basically, English is what happens when Vikings learn Latin, and use it to shout at Germans.”  That about sums it up.

Russian “Zombies”

All nouns, in Russian, are either animate (одушевле́нные) or inanimate (неодушевле́нные).  In theory, living things, and possibly sentient things are animate, and non-living things are inanimate.  In reality, determining whether a noun is animate is not straightforward at all. 

The Russian language is inconsistent when dealing with the deceased.  For instance, поко́йник and мертве́ц, dead man, are animate; while труп, dead body is inanimate. The Russian word for corpse, мертвец, is animate, which does raise questions about their experience with zombies.

Oil Price Required for Countries to Have a Balanced Budget, 2020

The global economy shutdown has severely impacted OPEC and mineral oil-producing nations.  Even a revised estimate of 400,000 barrels per day less, is too much.  The problem is that many OPEC countries are in bad financial shape, and over-reliant on elevated oil prices to support their inefficiency and corruption.  It would be difficult to revise it further down without political and social consequences.  They cannot simply stop the pumps, and throw more people out of work when there is virtually no safety net.  So they run at a huge loss, which will impact the balance sheet for years to come, and would like cause a cascading default of petrobonds. 

In 2021, oil was trading between US$30 to $40 per barrel on average, when oil producing nations need it to be above US$60 per barrel just to balance their budgets.  We have not averted the danger of a cascading default of petro-economy sovereign debt.  Some countries such as Malaysia and Bolivia even assumed oil prices well in excess of US$60 per barrel.  They borrowed on those assumptions, and they are in no position to service debt due. 

The following graphic does not include South America.

Words with Multiple Meanings

The following are examples of homonyms.  Homonyms are words that have the same spelling and usually sound alike, but have different meanings. 

The bandage was wound around the wound.

The farms produce produce.

The landfill had no more space, and had to refuse more refuse.

He would polish the Polish artwork.

The soldier wanted to desert in the desert.

He fell for the false lead and led them to the fell fell.

There is no time like the present to present the present.

The bass drum had a picture of a bass.

The startled dove dove into the bushes.

I object to the object.

The coupon was invalid for the invalid.

The people on the boat had a row about how to row.

The buck does gets excited when does are around.

He leaned close to close the door.

He had a fit about the fit of the suit.

I eye the eye on the sculpture.

Becoming Shorter

What word becomes shorter when you add two letters to it? 

Short.