Wording

I was recently drafting a letter to our medical interns. This is a letter about the common professional, medical, and ethical challenges they will face in daily practice – and more so at the end of their internship. It took a long time to write.

"If you don't mind," my friends told me, "you sound like Sir Humphrey Appleby, always beating around the bush. They will understand not an iota of what you mean. These days you should put away the toolkit of etiquette." Everyone says so.

It's rather sad, don't you think, to be downright explicit in our communication? It wasn't always so. I kept remembering that masterpiece toilet sign. It was something that Ruth Wajnryb wrote about in one of her books on language, of having linguistic politeness. In a ladies room, she read a sign above the cistern. It said: "There's a toilet brush next to the bowl in case it is needed." Not a single word of "you". Absolute anonymity. This is the most unblemished and unblaming communication I've ever known. Some of you might probably scoff at this example and say, "That's so goddamn beating around the bush." In that case, you will no doubt teach me to rewrite the sign like this: "If you dirty the bowl, you should/could/must use the brush."

If I could have one wish, just one crummy little wish, it would be that I don't have to rewrite. There was part of me that admired sitting on the fence, and part that loved the characteristic role of middle-born as a peacemaker.