Don’t dialogue with someone you can talk to. - William Zinsser

Most nonfiction writers have a definitiveness complex. They feel that they are under some obligation — to the subject, to their honor, to the gods of writing — to make their article the last word. It’s a commendable impulse, but there is no last word.

Nouns now turn overnight into verbs. We target goals and we access facts. Train conductors announce that the train won’t platform. A sign on an airport door tells me that the door is alarmed. Companies are downsizing. It’s part of an ongoing effort to grow the business. “Ongoing” is a jargon word whose main use is to raise morale. We face our daily job with more zest if the boss tells us it’s an ongoing project; we give more willingly to institutions if they have targeted our funds for ongoing needs. Otherwise we might fall prey to disincentivization.

Those subjects were for all those people who had an aptitude for them — the ones who carried a slide rule and could take a radio apart. I was a liberal arts snob, illiterate about the physical world I lived in, incurious about how things worked.