“Few people . . . have had much training in listening. The training of most oververbalized professional intellectuals is in the opposite direction. Living in a competitive culture, most of us are most of the time chiefly concerned with getting our own views across, and we tend to find other people’s speeches a tedious interruption of the flow of our own ideas.”

— S.I. Hayakawa, Symbol, Status, and Personality 32 (1963) (via Bryan Garner, author of Garner’s Modern American Usage, in his blog)

(photo: my garden, May 2014)