September 27, 2012 Theme: Anniversaries

The Linguists of Listowel joined together tonight to celebrate the club's 20-year anniversary and the theme anniversaries was very fitting for the meeting.
Audrey Orth called the meeting to order at 7:15 pm with 13 club members in attendance and also introduced our chairperson Jane Stoltz.
Jane's opening remarks included the meaning of the word anniversary and Jane also gave some very interesting history of the various club presidents, club members and places that the meetings have been held over the past 20 years such as the Listowel Mennonite church, Harvey Krotz Ford and now St. Paul's Lutheran church (not including some club members hosting meetings at their own residences at times). One of our existing club members, Marie McCutcheon, was one of the club's founding members back in 1992 and she joined in on the evening's celebrations.
Keith M provided the Joke of the Day to add some additional humour to the start of the meeting.
Over the course of the meeting, Jane Stoltz challenged each club member to share one of their personal memories about an anniversary relating to the Linguists of Listowel. There were some very funny anniversary memories.
Leo Brisebois was the loyal Toast and Timer for the meeting and he provided a patriotic toast to Canada and explained his role of keeping the meeting on time by using the timing lights to notify speakers when their speaking time is up.
George Nichol provided the Word of the Day and challenged all in attendance to use this word during the evening. The word was "fractious" which means easily irritated or bad tempered. George also counted the number of laughs during the meeting.
The Literary Corner role was filled by Val Hummel. Val provided everyone with a reading from the book "Chicken Soup for the Pet Lover's Soul" and the story was entitled "When Snowball Melted".
Our only speech for the evening was presented by Apryl Browning and it was a very emotional and moving speech about her pet dog. The speech was entitled "Chauncey".
Brent Jemmett was the Table Topics Master for the evening. Table Topics kept with the theme of anniversary and Brent sent around an envelope with little pieces of paper in it. On the pieces of paper were two bits of information; a number and a description. The number represented the anniversary year and the description referred to what gift was significant for that specific anniversary year. Lots of laughter erupted from this segment of the meeting with very humourous anniversary stories.
Keith Stoltz was the General Evaluator and he introduced Tony Galvao as Apryl's speech evaluator and Tony gave a great evaluation of Apryl's speech presentation.
Reports were given for the evening; The word "fractious" was used 9 times, there were 35 hard laughs and only 2 filler words used during the evening (great work!). Table Topics winner was Vern Noseworthy.
General Evaluator's comment highlights were; Audrey did a good job setting the tone for the meeting with her opening remarks during call to order. Jane did a very nice job with her "walk" down memory lane with all of the history and information flashbacks about the Linguists of Listowel over the past 20 years.
A grow point would be to extend Table Topics from 1 minute per person to 2 minutes per person during the months of September and October in preparation for the Table Topics competition where 2 minutes is required.
Vern Noseworthy was the Quiz Master for the evening and he challenged everyone in attendance to tell him who said certain phrases or words during the meeting. Vern did a very good job listening because he was able to "stump" the whole group on a few words and phrases that we didn't know who said them.
Anything for the Good of Toastmasters - The Linguists of Listowel Toastmaster Club was mailed a 20th anniversary certificate from Toastmasters International in recognition of the clubs achievement. This certificate will be proudly displayed at the upcoming Murder Mystery Dinner Theater on October 13th.
Next week, October 4th, will be the Humorous Speech and Table Topics contest for our club.
The meeting was adjourned at 9:00 pm and everyone enjoyed the delicious homemade anniversary cupcakes courtesy of Jane Stoltz.