CONTENTS FEATURE: Colloquial shortcuts offend in the long run SPOTLIGHT: EditPros clients in the news NET NOTES: Captivating web sites FEATURE: Colloquial shortcuts may be offensive in the long run      Seeking shortcuts is a matter of human nature. Explorer Jacques Cartier was in search of a route to China when he found Canada's St. Lawrence River in 1535. Henry Hudson was seeking a short route for the Dutch to the South Seas in 1609 when he stumbled upon New York Bay and the Hudson River.      While few unexplored areas remain in the world, people continue to seek shortcuts in their daily lives—faster routes to work, cell phones to conduct business while they're driving, one-hour photo processing, new heat-and-serve products in the frozen-food section of the grocery store. But brown dirt pathways worn diagonally across green lawns testify that one person's shortcut can be another person's eyesore.      While our language is peppered with colloquial abbreviations, some shortcuts may be overtly or subtly demeaning, patronizing or in some other way offensive.      You approach the salesperson at the shoe store.      "Can you help me? I'd like to try on a pair of these saddle shoes in a size 8-D," you explain.      "Sure. No problem," the salesperson responds.      No problem? No, you wouldn't think so, considering that the store has a stockroom full of shoes behind the curtain. And since the salesperson was hired to retrieve shoes for customers, you're not asking for special treatment. A generation or two ago, a salesperson might normally reply, "Certainly, ma'am. Would you like to see any other styles as well?" The salesperson's utterance of "No problem" is innocuous, but it reflects ignorance of social graces and indifference about propriety.      A variation offers the potential for revulsion. You order a hamburger, then remember to ask the food server to exclude onions.      "Sure. No sweat," he replies. You should hope not. No onions, no sweat, and no other body fluids, while you're at it. Whatever happened to, "Absolutely, sir, as you wish"? It's been replaced by a mumbled "Anything to drink?" Not even, "Would you like anything to drink?" You don't even get a complete question for your money these days.      The "no problem" response is really an abbreviation of a proper answer to an exchange in which someone requests a favor or special service. Suppose Officer Gunther Toody phones his beat partner Officer Muldoon at the police station and says, "Oooh! Oooh! Francis, I left my lunch pail in the patrol car," and Muldoon offers to retrieve it and take it to Toody's apartment because he was going to be driving nearby anyway. Muldoon might reasonably say, "That would be no problem, Gunther, because I'll be in your neighborhood later." The favor would, in fact, constitute somewhat of an inconvenience because Muldoon hadn't planned to stop at Toody's apartment. If Muldoon said, "no problem," he would be intentionally understating the imposition. But "no problem" is an inappropriate response from someone who is asked simply to do what's already expected.      We're subjected to lack of courtesy and respect not only at the hands of fast-food servers and retail store clerks, but also from the companies for which they work. Rather than trying to persuade us of the virtues of their products, manufacturers insult us with television commercials that tell us we're stupid if we don't buy their merchandise. Or they induce us to choose an automobile or garment or financial institution for superficial reasons, without offering any information about quality of ingredients, service, production processes or safety considerations. The voice-over for an automobile commercial rich in electronically generated visual wizardry offers only the following information: "Wood. Leather. Adrenaline." Don't such advertisers think their audiences are capable of comprehending complete sentences? Do advertisers think that offering more substantive product information would overwhelm their prospective customers?      In a commercial for a chain of pizza restaurants, a delivery boy is ascending a forbidding flight of stairs. He's delivering a large pizza called "Big Vinnie." The customer who answers the door is a stereotypical mobster, who bellows to the boy that he'd better not be expecting a tip. While the boy furtively retreats down the stairs, the mobster opens the pizza box to discover that two of the eight pieces are missing. "Hey!" he roars to no avail, as the announcer voice-over intones, "The last honest pizza." Honest? What's honest about a delivery boy swiping a quarter of a customer's pizza? The commercial may not provide any clues about the quality of the pizza ingredients, but it does suggest that pilfering is OK as long as you can run fast enough. If the intended notion is the irresistibility of the pizza, that's a mighty peculiar way to try to entice customers.      Many commercials contain a closing tag line telling listeners to "See store for details." See store? See Dick run. Run, Dick, Run. With just one additional second of airtime, the advertiser could say "Visit any of our stores for details"—a much friendlier, eminently more conversational approach. But advertisers seem to lack sufficient time for courtesy.      A sales representative tells you that you can reach her company's product support line "24/7." The term "product support" is what we used to call "help" in the old days, eight or so years ago. And "24/7" is shorthand for "24 hours per day, 7 days a week." But if a person tells you that product support is available 24/7, she really is saying she doesn't have much time for you. She is not only telling you to wait in a voicemail queue for answers to your questions, but also seems unwilling to exert enough breath in your behalf to say "around the clock, seven days a week." That's how little you matter to her. That's how impatient she is to move on to someone else.      Impatience is symptomatic of the computer age. The introduction of the personal computer in the mid-1980s was heralded as the means through which to improve our efficiency in performing mechanical functions and thereby increase our time for planning and leisure pursuits. However, that's not how the computer has manifested itself in our lives. If anything, it merely raised expectations. Word processors and electronic templates allow us to compose, revise and print a business letter in 15 minutes instead of the hour it required in the days of typewriters, erasers and white-out. However, we haven't gained 45 minutes of leisure or reflective time per letter; rather, we've driven ourselves to produce four letters per hour. We become irritated when the printer takes longer than 12 seconds to print a letter because it is supposed to be a "6 ppm" printer—an impatient abbreviation for "pages per minute."      Young companies and their young charges are too self-important to waste time saying "electronic" or Internet." Instead, they speak in jargon and preface every conceivable word in reach with an "e," giving us "ebusiness," "ecommerce," "ezine, "etailing" and other aberrations made all the more abominable by their lack of appropriate hyphenation.      We take shortcuts in our grammar, idiosyncratically turning nouns into verbs. A friend announces she is "transitioning into a new career" rather than "making the transition to a new career." A computer technician calls the process of updating the design of a computer network "rearchitecting the enterprise." Jargon and other linguistic shortcuts are elitist, exclusionary and often just plain rude, and they breed contempt. That's unfortunate, because courtesy takes very little effort and can reap many rewards. Give people who you supervise a remedial lesson in graciousness and consideration. They may be surprised to realize that the effort really is no problem. SPOTLIGHT: EditPros clients in the news CDRF helps establish new dairy research facility at Cal Poly State University in San Luis Obispo      A new program and associated laboratory facilities devoted to dry dairy ingredients have begun operation at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) in San Luis Obispo, Calif. The new Dairy Ingredient Applications Program is designed to serve researchers investigating the health and dairy production benefits of whole milk powder, nonfat dry milk, dry buttermilk and whey powders.      The program was established through the initiative of Dairy Management Inc. and the California Dairy Research Foundation (CDRF), an EditPros client. More than $750,000 in initial funding for the program was provided by commercial dairy farmers from throughout the United States.      The facility, operating under the technical direction of Associate Professor Phillip S. Tong of Cal Poly's Dairy Products Technology Center, includes laboratory and dairy processing pilot plant equipment, as well as a test kitchen. Within the first few weeks of the facility's operation, an ingredient supplier used the lab's particle size analyzer to study buttermilk powders for a snack food company interested in using the powder as a flavor carrier. Carolyn Podgurski, the center's dairy ingredients applications specialist, helped a dessert company evaluate the freeze/thaw stability of frozen confections.      Joe O'Donnell, executive director of CDRF, is enthusiastic about the nutritional promise that innovative application of dairy ingredients can deliver to the food manufacturing industry.      "Milk was designed to deliver health," said O'Donnell. "And once you break out its functional components you create almost limitless options for food ingredients."      Visit http://www.cdrf.org for more information. Echoes of the Sixties goes into second printing      Echoes of the Sixties, written by EditPros partners Marti Smiley Childs and Jeff March, is now in its second printing. Publisher Billboard Books ordered the second press run just six months after the initial publication of the book last November.      Orders from bookstores had nearly depleted the publisher's inventory by early May. Demand for the book is attributed in part to an overwhelmingly supportive response from disc jockeys and radio talk show hosts, more than 80 of whom have interviewed Childs and March on individual radio stations and on network broadcasts.      Echoes of the Sixties includes chapters about the Fireballs ("Sugar Shack"), Gary "U.S." Bonds ("Quarter To Three"), the Tokens ("The Lion Sleeps Tonight"), the Angels ("My Boyfriend's Back"), Peter and Gordon ("A World Without Love"), Mike Pinder of the Moody Blues ("Nights In White Satin"), the Beau Brummels ("Laugh, Laugh"),Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs ("Wooly Bully"), the Lovin' Spoonful ("Summer in the City"), Gary Puckett and the Union Gap ("Lady Willpower"), Country Joe and the Fish ("I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag"), and Iron Butterfly ("In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida").      "Echoes of the Sixties" (320 pages; $19.95 paperback; ISBN 0-8230-8316-0) is available through independent and national chain retail bookstores. It also may be purchased through on-line book sellers that are linked from our Web site at http://www.editpros.com/echoes.html. If your local bookstore is out of stock, rest assured that more copies will be available by late June. Net Notes: Captivating Internet resources Intellectual Property Network http://www.patents.ibm.com/      Conduct patent document searches on this site, which lets you locate and view United States patents, European patents and patent applications, PCT application data from the World Intellectual Property Office, and patent abstracts of Japan. CorpTech Database of 50,000 High-Tech Companies http://www.corptech.com/      This Web site is just what its name indicates. Search for information by company name, stock symbol, product category or geographic region. The site includes a database of 180,000 high-tech executives. Site operated by Corporate Technology Information Services Inc., Concord, Mass. Pollstar—The Concert Hotwire http://www.pollstar.com/      Find out when and where to catch your favorite singer or musical group in concert. Search by artist name, city or venue. This site is maintained by Pollstar magazine, the concert industry's leading weekly trade publication, based in Fresno, Calif. YOUR TURN: Ask the "grammar coach" or subscribe      We invite you to submit your questions to the "grammar coach," and we welcome you to subscribe to this monthly newsletter—which we'll send to your e-mail address at no charge. We respond to all "grammar coach" questions personally, but delays may occur because we must place top priority on assignments from our clients. We appreciate your patience and your interest.      You also can change your e-mail subscription address. For an address change, please indicate your existing AND your new e-mail address. Thank you. 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