Rules Schmules

There is a joke among business consultants that when you go into an organization, figure out if they are a top down organization where decisions flow from above, or a bottoms up organization where individual units have a great deal of autonomy. If a business is top down you recommend it become more bottoms up so that individual units can understand and respond to the marketplace more quickly. If it is bottoms up you recommend that it become more top down to avoid chaotic redundancy and lack of focus.

There is a lot of truth in this. There is no ideal organization. Every organizational structure has problems. Over time, organizations tend to oscillate between structures based on the current set of problems. The same is true in other aspects of life. Should dictionaries be descriptive or prescriptive? How much freedom should parents allow their children?

This note is about the balance between individual freedom and enforced order. Based on what I see in the United States, I think the pendulum has swung too far toward order and it is time to move toward more freedom of action. I think the current situation is largely based on unreasonable fears combined with a desire to make the world safer for ourselves and our children. The end result is not a safer society, but a society with less freedom and more rigidity of thought.

I think the current situation is based on widespread misunderstanding of humans and their capabilities. As a species we are remarkable in our ability to exist in social groups and to flexibly react to each other and the environment. Despite the fact that we are capable of unspeakable cruelty, on the whole we are extremely kind and cooperative with each other. We are also protective, particularly of the most vulnerable among us. I do not deny the atrocities and cruelty, the scams, the sociopathic behavior of both individuals and groups. I merely say that these are anomalies. Bad behavior makes the news and becomes a focus of our thoughts precisely because it is uncommon in a stable society like the US.

As individuals we also misunderstand risk and emotionally overreact to perceived danger. Lately Hans Monderman has been in the news. For example, Wired Magazine. Monderman was a Dutch traffic engineer who died in January 2008. Monderman improved safety by removing traffic controls. That's right, he removed speed limit and other traffic signs and signals to make the roads safer. At a busy intersection there is nothing to segregate pedestrian, bicycle, auto and truck traffic. He has a stunt to prove his point to reporters. I have seen several separate reports on this, but from the wired article:

We drive on to another project Monderman designed, this one in the nearby village of Oosterwolde. What was once a conventional road junction with traffic lights has been turned into something resembling a public square that mixes cars, pedestrians, and cyclists. About 5,000 cars pass through the square each day, with no serious accidents since the redesign in 1999. "To my mind, there is one crucial test of a design such as this," Monderman says. "Here, I will show you." With that, Monderman tucks his hands behind his back and begins to walk into the square - backward - straight into traffic, without being able to see oncoming vehicles. A stream of motorists, bicyclists, and pedestrians ease around him, instinctively yielding to a man with the courage of his convictions.

From the International Tribune.

"Who has the right of way?" he asked rhetorically. "I don't care. People here have to find their own way, negotiate for themselves, use their own brains."

When asked, people who use these uncontrolled intersections say they are not safe, despite the statistics to the contrary. The fact that people do not feel as safe, as controlled, leads them to be more careful. Take off the explicit controls and people use their own judgment to behave in ways that increase safety rather than the perception of safety.

We have allowed our fears to distort our behavior and our society in ways that I find unacceptable. One example of this is the way we treat our children. As a seven or eight year old child I had large amounts of time that were unsupervised. My mother had a bell to call us in for dinner. As long as I was within earshot of the bell at that time, I could do what I wanted. When I got my first bicycle at about the age of seven, my world expanded and I was allowed to roam at will as long as I was home at designated times. Because our family was a large tribe I had more freedom than most, but I was not alone. At Halloween groups of children, without parental accompaniment, roamed miles from their homes to scour the best neighborhoods for candy. Neighborhood children organized their own games without supervision.

The United States has changed, but it has not become less safe. I do not believe that the rate of child kidnapping or abuse by strangers has increased. There is more traffic, but I do not believe that our neighborhoods present more dangers. What has changed is the level of fear. We have institutionalized the belief that the world is unsafe and children cannot be trusted to operate without constant supervision. As a result, elementary school children are not allowed to walk a quarter mile to school by themselves. Because parents believe that children can never be left alone, activities outside of school are supervised and, as a result, expensive. The constant supervision also diminishes the development of conflict resolution skills. I am not saying that adults should not look out for children. To the contrary, each of us has a responsibility to keep everyone around us safe, especially the young and defenseless. The world is unsafe. Children do not understand much of what is going on around them. But it is safe enough and we are here to help them.

The same attitudes and fears have helped turn children into incipient economic units. The current school debates focus on more time in school and more controlled school environments. This regimentation devalues the children and, in the long run, will hurt us economically. The genius of the American economy is our flexibility and inventiveness. As we become more regimented, as children's education become more standardized, I believe we lose that flexibility and inventiveness.

I recognize that I am neither typical nor a role model. In a sense that is my point. Few of us are typical. Only a few people think I am stupid or incompetent. I do well in a field that requires both constant education and inventiveness. I consider myself to be reasonably well educated. I also didn't do homework until I entered the university. Homework was assigned, I just never did it. My grades through high school were spotty, but performance on tests seemed to overrule the bad homework grades. As far as I know, no one ever considered holding me back. Based on college entrance tests, I was admitted to the university after my junior year in high school.

In junior high school instead doing my homework, I was reading a book a day. I read all the science fiction, "boy in the country", and biographies in the school library. In high school I was reading the daily newspaper, two to three weekly news magazines, and several monthly magazines including Scientific American and the Atlantic Monthly (it used to be a monthly). I also studied mathematics on my own. Had I spent more supervised time in school or had more structured after school activities, I would not have had time to get my real education. Looking back, I think I could have benefited from better schools. By better schools I mean those populated by more educated, and flexible teachers. I do not believe I would have benefited by more structure or more hours in school.

As a society we seem to have grown more and more rule bound. By rule bound I mean respecting and enforcing rules without looking at the sense of the situation. I have always followed Bob Dylan's dictum "To live outside the law you must be honest". A simple example from my masters swim group. We rent lanes at one of the pools in town. In addition to the pool life guards, we provide our own coach on the deck. The lifeguards and pool administration have recently gotten upset because some of our swimmers did not enter the pool feet first as the rules require. This is an experienced group of swimmers, many of them competitive. In my several years of swimming with the group, I have not seen a dangerous entry into the pool. The lifeguards either have no idea what is dangerous, have no idea why the rule exists, or are simply complaining about infractions for the sake of the rule itself.

As Monderman's practical experiments with traffic show us, posting and enforcing rules does not always make us safer. We are at our best when we take the time and effort to understand and respond to the particular circumstances in which we find ourselves.

Rules are a means to an end, not the end itself. The valid reasons behind the rules should be obeyed and enforced. If a rule is about safety and you are in a position to enforce, enforce safety not the rule. This is not a slide down a slippery slope toward anarchy. It is a slide down the slope toward respect and humanity. As with all things, you must do this intelligently and with awareness of your own limitations. Don't let your like or dislike of a person cause you to abuse your power and selectively enforce the rules.

If you are in a position to make rules, make sure that you are addressing a real problem, not the perception of a problem. Do not make rules in the mistaken belief that you can enforce conflict out of existence (the homeowners association fallacy). In work environments, try not to rigidly enforce standard practice at the expense of better solutions.

In our day to day lives each of us should remember the old saying, "People who like sausage and respect the law should never watch either of them being made". Rigid order is both impossible and overrated. Do the right thing. Help and protect those around you. This has nothing to do with rules, it has to do with humanity.

Following Politics Too Closely Makes You Stupid

I'm reading (and recommend) "The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. As with his preceding book, "Fooled by Randomness" it deals in part with human limitations in predicting the future and, in particular, our inability to judge risk.

One of his themes is what others call the pull of narrative. As a species we like a nice story and we also wonder what happens next. It doesn't seem to matter how banal the story is (gossip or business plans) or how outlandish (soap operas or business plans). We are drawn in. Something is being shown or explained. We want to understand how the pieces fit together and to imagine what happens next. One of Taleb's points is that the narratives we see and invent for the world around us are not only false, they also lead us astray and cause us to miss what is actually occurring. A black swan is something that we do not see coming, but seems obvious once it has occurred and we create an appropriate narrative. The current financial meltdowns are a case in point. We will be paying for the debacle for generations. While the seeds were being sown many smart, and sometimes well intentioned, people gave us a story about how the financial instruments at the base of the crisis reduced risk. Now that credit markets are freezing, we have new stories that tell how greedy people acted blindly and exposed everyone to grave risks.

In political discourse the same human foibles apply and are even magnified. Every side is selling a story. The vehicle for the story is mostly TV and radio through ads and news stories. Each installment of the story must be communicated in about thirty seconds. Very occasionally a full minute can be used. Because the audience only observes intermittently, each installment must be repeated many times to make sure everyone keeps up. This is one of the origins of "talking points". Consistent messages are easier to remember. Constant repetition makes it more likely the message will be heard, and more likely the ideas will be accepted at face value (everyone is saying it). This leads to a slow accretion of fragments that fit into a consistent theme or story that the proponent hopes is persuasive.

In an odd way, the fragmentary delivery of political messages makes them more effective. Like the next installment of a soap opera, new talking points fill in a missing piece and lead us to wonder what is next. The abbreviated format force reduction of the message to slogans and codewords that mean more than the actual statement. These not only reinforce the story, they act as cheers to emotionally charge supporters who have accepted the truth of the underlying message. All sides engage in this but, in the United States, conservatives have been much more effective at this style of communication. They just have better slogans. There are keywords like "liberal" and phrases like "tax and spend". They are even better at adjectives. One recent ad talked about an opponent supporting "massive government", which has succeeded the epithet "big government". Each of these keys on a part of a larger narrative. Political narratives have existed for as long as the human race, but the modern form is based on commercial advertising and uses all the tools and techniques of that craft including testing and focus groups.

Political communication has been simplified to mere advertising, but the problems we face are not simple. There is essentially nothing that can be learned about a complex situation in thirty seconds. Regardless of the party or position, every ad you listen too is misleading. The same is true of the news stories. Simplified communication can communicate at most first order forces. Complex situations are often the result of many different forces, some of them quite removed from the obvious.

I take one ad, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pRHliGZl-o, as an example, not because there is anything special about it, but because there isn't anything special. It typifies the level of discourse. It happens to come out of the Republican camp. The ad shows gas prices going up, "the US has more oil resources than Saudi Arabia" but "85% of it is off limits" and the opposing candidate "voted against development of American energy".

The first level of skepticism should be the facts presented. Anyone who works with numbers about the real world knows how difficult it is to get valid numbers and that the numbers are usually based on simplifying assumptions. The statement that the US has more oil resources than Saudi Arabia presumes that we have a good idea about what those reserves are. For both the US and Saudi Arabia, we do not know about the reserves. Some of this is genuine ignorance (we haven't looked), some of it is global politics (the Saudi's have every reason to lie). It also depends on what you mean by "reserve". Does oil shale in Colorado count the same way as a typical Saudi oil field?

Moving past the "facts" we get to the implied world view. Implied is the notion that gasoline and oil are synonymous with energy and that lower gas prices are good public policy. Beyond that is the notion that opening the 85% of reserves that are off limits will reduce the price of Gasoline. None of these are particularly good assumptions for reasons that would take more than thirty seconds to explain.

After hearing a typical political ad or even candidate speech, you are actually more ignorant than you were before. You have been deliberately deceived and your emotions played upon to accept a world view that is questionable and policies that, if you investigated further, you might very well disagree with.

What to do then? Try to get real information. On the whole, books are much more valuable than any kind of daily/weekly/monthly news. But recognize that books can be commissioned as propaganda as easily as many other things. Trust authors who examine the situation dispassionately and who genuinely research all sides. If you are interested in oil, do not start with anything political. Instead, read science articles on exploration and estimation. On most subjects it is best to get a good grounding in the state of the information and its limitations, then move to issues of policy. At least you will recognize the blatant distortions.

Policy has to do with where we are and what we want for ourselves and the world. In terms of policy, it is not enough to have an intent, we must also examine the risks, the likelihood of failure, and strategies that have worked and failed in the past. Because each of us is in a different situation, wants different things, and weighs choices differently, your judgements on policy and tactics will differ from your neighbors.

If you do all this, you will be as well informed as you can. You will also be wrong on basic issues. The way you think the world works will be incorrect. There is no avoiding this. The world is a complicated place. We just do the best we can.

Machine Politics

Political machines are self perpetuating systems generally based on personal loyalty and patronage. In the United States people generally think of political machines in terms of large cities. For example: the Richard Daley machine in Chicago, Tammany Hall in New York. But a political machine can exist at any level of government. At the state level we have had Huey Long in Louisiana and Thomas Catron in New Mexico. At the national level, Tom Delay ran a comprehensive and relatively effective national political machine.

The nature of a machine depends on the power structure of the society in which it is embedded. In societies where political power is influenced by election, the basic mechanics of the machine center on getting votes. In hierarchical societies (feudal, tribal...) machines center on fealty often coerced by violence.

Political machines are not an aberration. They are based on an essential part of being human. As a social animal, we live in groups. We band together for mutual support and protection. We form friendships and animosities. We try to help our friends and expect them to do the same. When someone thwarts our plans, we will undermine him in order to accomplish our aims. Political machines are not unalloyed evil. In order to maintain a power base, a machine may be extremely response to their supporters. In many cases this improves government services. In supporter's areas, the trash is picked up and the roads are good.

Political machines are about power. Its members may espouse, and believe in, a particular ideology, but the heart of a machine is not ideological, it is personal. A machine must have a way to reward supporters and punish enemies. In fact, one of the hallmarks of the machine mentality is an enemies list.

For political machines the source of power is the machinery of government. Government taxation provides a base of money. This money provides direct means to reward in the form of jobs and contracts. Withholding jobs and money provides a means of punishment. Government regulation provides another carrot and another stick. Businesses can be shut down through regulation or over-vigorous enforcement. Conversely, the skids can be greased by removing regulations or declining to enforce them. Taxation itself is a great lever. Taxes can be reduced on friends and increased on enemies. All of this requires that the machine controls the levers of government.

City machines are perhaps the easiest to understand and examine. The Daley organization controlled on the order of 30,000 patronage jobs. There was a strict hierarchy based on electoral politics. The city was divided into wards and precincts. Political appointees were responsible for estimating and delivering the votes in their area. At every level of the machine, there were rewards and punishments. The plus side is government responsiveness. An influential person gets his requests answered. A important precinct might get better city services. On the other hand, precincts where the machine lost might find themselves without city services and city jobs.

Electoral politics are used to ensure control over government, but machines are personal. By cooperating with the machine, you should personally benefit. By defying, you are personally punished. Reward can be through direct payment, perhaps by being given a job that may or may not require work. More profitable is the ability to steer government money. A lucrative government contract can act as payment. If you are the person deciding where the contract should go, that power is worth something. Typical forms of personal payment can be bribes, kickbacks or jobs for friends. Political machines thrive on graft. When personal profit takes precedence over public good, everyone suffers.

In national politics the same basic mechanics exist, but because of the scale the details change. On a national level, campaigns are won with money. Loyalty can be bought with campaign money.

Direct contributions to particular candidates and parties are restricted. Campaigns that address large numbers of individual voters can raise tremendous amounts of money. However, each individual contributor is not that important to the campaign. If you want to gain attention, you can become a "bundler". A bundler gathers together the campaign money from a set of individuals. The bundler may not put up all the money himself but becomes personally powerful by being able to control a large donation. There have, or course, been scandals where bundlers paid the money to the individuals who turned around and contributed it. The bigger the bundle, the more powerful the bundler becomes.

At the national level, lobbyists for industries and particular points of view are very important. Lobbyists must be able to argue persuasively, but another important function is to provide monetary support for those who support them. This support provides access to the political process. Tom Delay took this to a new level. First, he steered contributions to his political action organizations. That made candidates beholden directly to him. He also inserted himself into the lobbying firms themselves. Access required political approval in hiring. This made lobbying itself a patronage job.

At the national level, the personal loyalty and reward structure of machines remains the same, but the amount of money available is much larger.

Rules and Reality

For the past few years I have been consulting with large businesses on software projects. As a result, I see a lot of different companies and cultures. Recently I have been working with a very profitable media company with a more extreme schizophrenia than most companies.

Part of the business involves coordinated release of merchandise from many different manufacturers. The list of manufacturers is constantly shifting. The product standards are high and manufacturers must work off the latest artwork. The artwork is constantly being refined and the time-lines are short and getting shorter. This creates a business need for rapid processes. In addition to a shifting cast of manufacturers, the company relies on contractors to do much of its essential work. Many contractors have worked in the same capacity for years, but there is also a churn of contractors and contractor employees.

Another part of the business is concerned with protection of intellectual property. Protection often requires tight control on access. That is, no one should be allowed access to company property until all the correct agreements have been drafted, reviewed, revised, and finally approved. This desire for protection has bred a culture of slow deliberation. Every formal decision involves slow and ponderous study and documentation (with periodic formal reviews).

These two strains, the need for rapid response and the slow processes that protect, exist in many organizations. In the case of this media company the culture has fractured. The protective processes are so slow and insular that they must be subverted. As an example, access to buildings is controlled by key cards. Getting permission to issue a key card is difficult and slow. The need for access may evaporate before a card can be approved. As a matter of common practice, those without key cards simply follow a carded employee into the building. Carded employees understand the situation and do not question when someone enters behind them. One morning I followed someone to the door only to find that neither of us had cards, so we both waited by the door for a carded employee. That employee let us in without question or hesitation.

For the software system I am examining, the development process involves asking people who use the system for their requirements. A fair number of those requirements are essentially "We have a way to subvert company policy because we cannot possibly follow it, but it is difficult and cumbersome. Could you make the subversion easier?"

For both individuals and organizations there is often a disconnect between our rules and what we actually do. Because people and the world are more complicated than our notions of them, some disconnect is inevitable. The healthy side is when we recognize the need to be flexible to accommodate novel situations. The unhealthy side is hypocrisy and self deception. If you cannot follow the rules the fault may be yours, but do not discount the possibility that the rules or their implementation is broken. Besides, strict adherence to any set of rules is not much of a virtue.

It is Your Civic Duty - Lie to Political Pollsters

It is your civic duty to lie to political pollsters to make polls as unreliable as possible. It is not enough to refuse to answer the questions, you have to lie.

The rest of this article deals with why, but I want to take a moment on the practical - how to lie. There are several amusing techniques for this. Here are two. The most reliable one is to pretend you are someone else, but completely stereotype their views. Choose your crazy Aunt Myrtle or your grandmother who votes for the "most handsome" candidate. The important thing is that their views do not agree with yours. This technique has the advantage of a coherent, if mildly insane, point of view. That makes it hard for pollsters to simply discard your answers as nonsensical. I suspect that most polling techniques do not allow for throwing out responses. That allows for more extreme techniques. I choose random numbers, the digits of pi for example, and use those to determine my answers. If the next digit is 3 and there are three choices, I answer with the third one. If there are only two answers I choose the first because 3 and 1 are both odd numbers. The other day I owned a company with over 100 employees, but made less than 20 thousand a year and had no health insurance.

At first you may find it hard to give an answer that you absolutely and positively disagree with, but I assure you, you get over it and it becomes fun after a while.


Here is what I want from political candidates and the media that covers elections. I want to know how the candidates think about the world and our place in it, and how they are likely to vote on issues I care about. Political polling makes it less likely that I will get what I want from the media, from political parties, and from the candidates themselves. Each of us should do what we can to remove polling from the political landscape. Lying is the easiest and most effective way I can think of to make the polls disappear.


The Media:

Media coverage of elections is bad and not getting better. From "A First Look at Coverage of the 2008 Presidential Campaign".


Just 12% of stories examined were presented in a way that explained how citizens might be affected by the election, while nearly nine-out-of-ten stories (86%) focused on matters that largely impacted only the parties and the candidates. Those numbers, incidentally, match almost exactly the campaign-centric orientation of coverage found on the eve of the primaries eight years ago.

Here is what we get from the media

• Horserace coverage. Candidate Smith is 3% up in the polls, candidate Jones is gaining in a final stretch surge in the polls. Candidate McMurry wins by a nose. Candidate Rostnikov outdid candidate McMurry in fund-raising in the month of June.



• Political strategy coverage. Polling shows 27% of the electorate is "very concerned" about issue "Horses that have left the barn". The Animal party intends to take advantage of this with a direct mail campaign to people who do not own horses emphasizing their position that barn doors should be self closing.



• Discussion of the polls. After a poll proves unreliable, the media spend a lot of time talking about why. This is particularly corrosive because it uses up time that could be used discussing something of importance. It is also completely vacuous because if the pollsters knew why they were wrong they would have corrected for it before the poll was published. My goal is to stop this discussion by making ALL political polls unreliable.



• Reporting of partisan polls. Many polls are commissioned by people with an axe to grind. Questions are created that invite a particular answer, then it is reported that "By a vast majority, the electorate oppose beating dead horses."

Nonsensical explanations. Poll results are often analyzed as though the polls were answered by a single person and that person had a coherent set of beliefs. This invented person if often called "the electorate". For example, "The electorate seem to feels that taxes are too high." In fact, poll results do not reflect anyone's views. They are an aggregate measure.

Parties and Special Interest Groups

Here is what we get from the parties and special interest groups:

• Attack ads on targeted, hot-button topics. "Candidate Rostnikov voted to allow horses to escape, often to be killed". These ads invariably inflame passion, distort the candidates views, and cheapen the debate. Here is a simple rule. There is nothing meaningful that can be learned about a candidate in 30 seconds.



• Feel good ads. These are essentially selling the candidate with the same techniques as Coca Cola. There are some general techniques: attractive smiling people doing good things, flags waving, children and a better future. Polling and focus groups allow the political machines to tune these ads like a drug formula.



• Pandering. Here is a definition of pandering: "To cater to the lower tastes and desires of others or exploit their weaknesses." Pandering is often subtle, but sometimes not. If someone offers you money "A $1000 tax rebate" or "repeal/suspend a tax", they are pandering. "Lower tastes and desires" are easy to figure out. In politics, money usually does the trick. But, effective pandering requires some excuse so you feel justified in receiving the the largess. That is where polling comes in.



• Very specific targeting of particular people. Based on your answers to political polls, you will categorized. This allows you to be targeted very specifically. If a candidate Hernandez knows that it is very important to you that koala bears remain a symbol of affection and comfort, you may be targeted with a koala bear ad. It will paint the opposing candidate, Walenski, with some plausible evidence, as someone who just doesn't care about koalas. Hernandez is counting on your affection for koalas to motivate you to support him and oppose Walenski. A closer examimination of the candidates voting records may show that Hernandez is likely to vote for a measure that will cost you your job, but he does like those koalas and Walenski seems to hate them.

A few interesting links to follow if you are interested in the topic:

• Polling Politics, Media, and Election Campaigns


• Poll-obsessed media focus on strategy over substance


• Horse race reporting - 92 election

Nanny nanny boo boo

Some time ago when I both had and worked with young children I noticed an interesting thing. Kids of particular ages have their own expressions that are not used by either adults or children of other ages. My favorite example is from kids under about six years old who chant "Nanny nanny boo boo." This is a shortening of the full expression "Nanny nanny boo boo. Stick your head in doo doo." This taunt is typically used in chasing games and means "You can't catch me you ...". I have heard this chant in multiple locations thousands of miles apart, and I have heard it over a period of years. As far as I can tell it is: persistent, widespread, and completely restricted to young children. I don't think I have ever heard an adult use the full expression.

Other age groups seem to have similar cultural artifacts. Junior high kids who would never dream of being so immature as to say "Nanny nanny boo boo" may tell you the joke about the pygmy tribe called the fakawi. In tall grasslands, people of this tribe can be found jumping up and yelling "We're the fakawi". Say it with a Brooklyn accent - its an aural joke. I had an adult neighbor repeat this one to me the other day, but I believe it is largely confined to junior high aged kids.

This is anecdotal and I have no real conclusions about the phenomena, I just find it fascinating that culture can be transmitted horizontally through an age group without the mediation of adults or even family.

Mangled Alphabet

There are times when it is important to have the correct spelling of a spoken word. Because many English letters are difficult to distinguish when they are spoken (c, g, z), it is common to distinguish them by using a word. There is a standard word alphabet for this: Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo...

But suppose your desire is not to be understood, but to be obscure. For example, the Internal Revenue Service calls to track down your offshore bank account. You don't want to be convicted of perjury, but you don't really want to be helpful either.

Here is a mangled alphabet for your pleasure. Just imagine being on the phone and saying "My name is Jim, J as in jalapeno, i as in ingenue, m as in mnemonic. What do you mean repeat myself, don't you speak English?".

The alphabet is a combination of spellings that do not match sounds, sounds that say a letter that is not the one of interest, accents on a misleading syllable, and obscure words that distract from the task at hand. With some letters I found it hard to be truly misleading. Suggestions are welcome.

A - Aoife (EE-feh) Irish female name
B - byssus (BIS-uhs)
C - cent (sent)
D - Django (JANG-oh) Django Reinhardt jazz great
E - elephant (EL-uh-fuhnt)
F - feign (feyn)
G - gnostic (NOS-tik)
H - honor (ON-er)
I - ingenue (AN-zhuh-noo)
J - jalapeno (hah-luh-PEYN-yoh)
K - knife (nahyf)
L - llano (YAH-naw)
M - mnemonic (ni-MON-ik)
N - nigeria (nahy-JEER-ee-uh)
O - opossum (POS-uhm)
P - phrenology (fri-NOL-uh-jee)
Q - quran (koo-RAHN)
R - Rhone (rohn)
S - sent
T - tsar (zahr)
U - umbilical (uhm-BIL-i-kuhl)
V - verisimilitude (ver-uh-si-MIL-i-tood)
W - whole (hohl)
X - Xerox (ZEE-rox)
Y - Ysolde (ee-ZAWL-duh)
Z - zakat (zuh-KHAT)