Liar liar pants on fire

Who knew? Until I started researching for this post, I had no idea that William Blake, the poet, was the likely source of this colorful and catchy phrase. In his 1810 poem, The Liar, he phrases it somewhat more elegantly: Deceiver, dissembler/Your trousers are alight. In any event, this colorful phrase comes to mind in this campaign season. The Tampa Bay Times maintains a useful non-partisan site called PolitiFact that fact checks the candidates' claims, with ratings on a truth-o-meter that has a setting called Pants-on-fire for the most outrageously untrue claims.

Email best practices

Do you use abbreviations in email? How about emoticons? Unless you know your recipient well, you should probably avoid both abbreviations and emoticons or smiley faces. What else can you do to make your email clear to the reader? Well, the one tip most people seem to forget is use a clear subject line. Studies show most business users can't handle more than about 50 messages a day. You know if your recipient gets that many, some of them probably aren't even opened. So help the reader out by making your purpose clear with a good subject such as Agenda for Wednesday meeting. Here are some other etiquette tips to produce better email and better results.