ean, mean, and mean —for the third issue of Olive, I originally thought I would toss in a word that was an adjective as well as a noun and a verb. Until I remembered (and googled) what other people (more literary than I) had to say about adjectives.
Harper Lee: Atticus told me to delete the adjective and I’d have the fact.
Mark Twain: When you catch an adjective, kill it.
Voltaire: The adjective is the enemy of the noun.
Please note there are no adjectives in Latin! They are declined like nouns.
So…moving on to “mean” as a verb. One often hears someone say, “What did she REALLY mean,” pairing the unfortunate verb with another reprehensible part of speech, the adverb. To my dismay, I then found that in one of the articles in this issue, “Why FFI is Really an Institute,” assumes that the founders did not mean what they said when they named FFI The Family Firm Institute. I still like the article and hope my co-authors, Mark Evans and Pramodita Sharma, will agree that it would be better named, “Why FFI is an Institute.”
Next…we have “mean” as a noun and no, I don’t mean average. (But I might be wrong and mean median! There seems to be confusion on what “mean” means in mathematical terms.) Using “middle” as a reasonable definition (why do all these words start with an “m”?), I’m including a book officially authored by FFI, but written by me, Jane Hilburt-Davis, and Paul Karofsky. “Family Enterprises: Understanding Families in Business and Families of Wealth” is one of many books written on this topic in recent years. For my purposes in this editorial, I would rank it in the middle on a “comprehensive scale.” For instance, using a scale of 1-11, it is a 6 with five being not quite as comprehensive and five being more comprehensive.
Next…assuming you’re still with me, this issue includes two sets of poems. One is a set of haikus, entitled “Three Attempts at Haikus,” written by me. The second, entitled “Poems?”, is written by Elizabeth Delgass, who happens to be my cousin. I like to think of these as her Bergman to my Strindberg! Quite a stretch, which I probably “really” don’t mean.
Finally… in Friends of Judy, is an essay by Henry Krasnow, entitled “When I was your age…” To win Henry’s phantom prize, you have to imagine yourself in 2093, filling in the blanks that follow the ellipses.
OK…I might have gone over the edge with ambiguity in this issue, but I still hope you enjoy reading Olive, September 2023.