We have a few traditions around here. We recently restarted one: Inspiration. When we meet for the eDao game each week, someone brings inspiration. This week, I volunteered to do it. And then realized shortly before we were going to begin that I didn’t have anything ready.

Oops. But, wait! I could do what any good CEO would do. Use somebody else’s lines! I could Google my way there. Hmmm… what to troll the great inter-tubes for? CEO Inspiration sounded so… inspid. Tweak. Tune. Ah! “Twisted CEO Inspiration.” That sounded promising. So thus typeth Tim into the great search engine beast. The beast promptly informed me that it couldn’t find those three words together anywhere. With all of us monkeys typing away at all of our typewriters, it’s amazing that we haven’t already created every possible short phrase possible. There are only a few million million million combinations after all.

And it’s a shame. The world really needs a little more “Twisted CEO Inspiration”. And as soon as Google finds this blog entry, it will have it.

Of course, that means I have to invent some. I hit an absolutely brilliant blog entry recently that started like this:

It has been vulgarly claimed that prostitution is the oldest profession. Wrong! It’s lexicography.

Here’s proof:

As we have learned, perhaps in elementary school, a word isn’t a word unless it’s in the dictionary.

If it’s not a word, you can’t use it.

Therefore, you need the dictionary before you can utter a word. So dictionary making has to be among the oldest of professions, if not the oldest.

This logic, incidentally, solves the question of the origin of human language, a question that has vexed linguists ever since Darwin proposed his theory of evolution.

When I was in college, I briefly considered switching to Education. It took exactly one class to convince me otherwise. I quickly realized that most of the students in that room were probably there because they didn’t have a chance at a degree in much else.

I could pile more education stories (both mine and my daughter’s) on top of that. Like the one where my daughter started learning multiplication in kindergarten, had to switch schools and then spent two years doing more basic math. Hearing “I didn’t learn anything today” for two years is definitely a drag.

And there are some great teachers out there, too. My Best Man teaches Biology in Houston. For years, until the great revolution of grading schools began (and he had to teach to the test every day), he was able to both teach the material and do it in a way that so inspired his kids that, over a school year, many went above and beyond to create impressive portfolios of their work over. I’ll bet more than one of his students got into college on the strength of one of those.

Labels like teacher and expert don’t always mean anything. The best of them open things up and free you. A lot of the rest seem to specialize in chaining us in rules and precedents. Or at least handcuffs. Many members of the oldest profession carry them, don’t you know?