Sunday Newscape Magazine

Stylish men’s underwear. Those are not words I ever expected to include in a column. If you ask the men in my family, those are words that should be banned - on pain of a slow and torturous death - from being included in the same sentence.

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly. - Richard Bach

Endlessly it drones on...economic times are tough and predicted to get worse before they get better. There's no doubt that many of us have felt the financial pinch and some have felt the dagger. Yet, others, who've experience no drastic changes at all, are wondering what all the bellyaching is about.

I’m going to share with you some secret information and after that, you can come to your own conclusion. Every business day, across the country, there are people in dozens of locations analyzing consumer market trends and trying to figure out ways to manipulate you into doing what they want you to do.

A couple of weeks ago, in my “The ‘Road to Heaven’ at Sobibor,” I mentioned that my great-great-grandfather, Alexander Levy, who lived in Holland around the turn of the 18th century,  changed his family name from Levy to de Wind.

Why did he do that?

What we say and how we say it are inextricably connected. The terms we employ issue pictures describing attitudes, feelings. We do not always consciously choose those words, pictures, images. Often they are habituated. We can become inured to the images they form.