Gary c Tesser

We have a couple of problems here. 1. (A relatively minor point, but one that niggles: Guest_Annie, please try to avoid using "rescind" in this context. The word applies to something else, in parliamentary procedure. Of course, as a speaker of English, Guest_Annie cannot be faulted for speaking English, which clearly and unexceptionably Guest_Annie is doing here, in describing what a board member does when he has -- maybe -- submitted his resignation and now wants to take it back. But give it a couple of hours till the sun comes up over eastern North America and watch them.) 2. An overview: As a rule, once a resignation is properly accepted, it's all over. So if we determine that it had been properly (or acceptably) submitted, and properly accepted, then it is final; he is no longer a board member; and that cannot be reversed. Further, in general: a submitted resignation can be withdraws (a preferred wording) any time before it is accepted -- the proper acceptance signals the end of his board membership, and therefore his right to withdraw it. To continue: 3. RONR says that "a resignation is submitted in writing, addressed to the secretary or appointing power; alternatively, it may be submitted during a meeting either orally or in writing (p. 291)." Whether the e-mail submission qualifies as written submission is a question that your organization will have to determine for itself (um, unless it already has). So: looking at each aspect of all this closely, his resignation might or might not be valid, because of its possibly flawed delivery. 4. If the secretary and president are authorized to accept the board member's resignation, and if they have done so ("acknowledging" that they have received it falls short of accepting it, in my opinion, but remember that it's not my opinion that counts), then it is a done deal. So, Guest_Annie, first see whether the bylaws authorize them to accept resignations. If so, then he's gone; if not, their acknowledgement is equivalent only to the old-fashioned "Dear Sir or Madame, I am in pleased recipience of your communication of the 17th inst." followed by an offer of a pinch of snuff that you might find in Dickens: it in no way affects his membership on the board. Regarding, then, "the appointing power" mentioned above (item 3, above, quoting RONR 11th, p. 291): find out who that is. If the board member had been elected by the membership (perhaps the most common way), then it is the membership -- only -- who can accept the resignation (unless, of course, the bylaws provide otherwise). (5. Ignore what happened? It might be the highlight of our week!)

That struck me too. But if by "we" she means the organization itself, then maybe yeah.

Aside from istallation, what do the bylaws say about the terms of office? (Please quote exactly.) (Josh, how can you confidently say the meeting was null and void, since all we have are paraphrases?)

Is that an explanation of why the subversion is allowed?

Before 9 in the morning. I'm going for coffee and maybe try it again.

Come to think of it, that's probably what "every other month," in the first sentence of the original post, means.

(Wow, I didn't think that would happen! What an Internet we have these days!)

An hour and a half and a clonazepam and a couple listens to Air on G (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_FfAi68aW8 , with the ethereal Sarah Chang), and let's hope Guest Lanelle has joined the Calm Down Gary club, and that Guest Lanelle is also the current Guest Guest (Post 16) this time. So now here we are, the official day of the board meeting, it's 3 AM and only Guest Lanelle and I are still up (EDT). Guest Lanelle figures maybe only she and the new VP of External Relations will show up. (I might come to offer support, but I infer from Lanelle's hints that she's in Nome or Sydney, and I don't think my bus can get there in time.) So some thoughts. 1. Can she phone a few board members and maybe accumulate a quorum? -- they could then do any business that a board meeting can do, since they will indeed be having one, and the dinner chair and Ben can stew in their own juices (I think that's a cooking metaphor, and probably disgusting). 2: Guest Lanelle, please explain how the third paragraph of your Original Post ("I might add ...") is germane: right now, I don't see how it might influence the discussion. 3. Guest Lanelle, might not this be a more important problem? Your dinner chair and Ben sound awfully gracious and accommodating, I would nominate them for President (write them in and vote next month! -- at least you-all in the USA) or Pope (vote you Cardinals, or at least hit the ball once in a while) if they weren't so genially disdainful of the bylaws. Here on the Robert's Rules Website Forum (RONR MB), that's kinda a deal-breaker. 4. The bylaws mandate a monthly meeting. What happened to the August meeting? 5. Yes of course. Why not? Because Ben doesn't want to come?

I just blew it up. O Great Steaming Cobnuts.

How does your dinner chair type so damn small??!?

(There's too much to correct in my rant of yesterday, post 26, so just a couple of essentials. (1. "AJD" was s typo for "AHD," the American Heritage Dictionary. (2. My apologies to Guest...George for perhaps hijacking his thread. (3. The primary, unless only essential, thing for a writer to do is be interesting. So to any who found my eruption to be uninteresting after bothering to read it, I do apologize.) [A year and a half later ... I have fixed some of the errors. -- GcT]

(I guess if Guest-Edgar has his way, a expressed a day or so, I'd owe the website about $18 by now.)

I myself don't see any of that amounting to "stubborn arrogance or contempt" (AHD. which I think you yourself got a copy of because I got mine from a second-hand used dictionary salesman who continually, intransigently, undercut my price) MIxing metaphors, well goodness gracious. But further: I've always thought of the convention of dropping the appropriate "s" after the plural of a possessive as likely a senseless, capricious artifice, initiated from whole cloth by a self-important pedant who takes it upon himself to write a grammar book, which unaccountably is seized upon by the slavish gentry critics and immediately becomes canon. As often happened, a lot in the mid-1800's, when a lot of English clergymen had a lot of free time on their hands because social, economic, and ecumenical developments had suddenly diminished their capacity to tell pontifcally (ouch), to dictate to people (their "flocks") what do do, some of them went to writing grammar books, and often supplementing their lofty ideal of preaching to the multitude with a desperately needed way to pay the rent, which incorporated the knowledge and wisdom of that day along with some of the writers's (I'm making a point here!) prejudices, caprices, and whimsical intent to make people do something just to watch people do something pointless and senseless just because these these self-appointed arbiters decided that the people should comply with what these writers wrote. Notwithstanding that it's been obvious to any schoolchild, then and now and in between, or rational person either, that the logical, and aesthetically proper, way to write the possessive of a plural should be for no reason different from the way to do it with a singular. But some pedant some decades ago told us to drop the second "s" the one after the apostrophe, the one that makes sense of the word unless we believe this otherwise-unemployed writer that suddenly that apostrophe, until now a mere diacritical mark, has suddenly by the grace of God (these writers were mostly underpaid pastors, remember) achieved active meaning in the sentence.* So that the "s" in "'s," is suddenly dispensable; superfluous; actively unwanted. One might ask, so if that's the case, why not drop ALL the "s's" in possessives? When talking of a truck belonging to Hank, why not write Hank' <pants truck>? When the Defense Department issues a pronouncement, why not write of the Defense Department' pronouncement? Because we're so elegant about the s's at the ends of the word? C'mon! Defy the authorities! Attica! Attica! This is personal to me because of a lesson I learned in the third grade, or maybe second. I was in class and we had a spelling test. One of the words we students were asked of was the non-color <shade> between white and black. Now, earlier in the week, I had been reading a book by an English writer. The copy I was reading was not shipped from overseas; I remember the publisher was American, likely as not Scholastic Book Services of Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. And while I'm pretty sure that if words like "color" had been spelled in the book with a "u," i would have stood out in my mind; but it did not. Nevertheless, I'm sure that I read in more than one place the word asked for in that spelling test, and in the book it had been spelled "grey." So I wrote that the word is spelled "grey." And when the results came back, I was marked wrong on that spelling. So I objected. And I produced my book, in which the word appeared, as evidence. And my protest was sloughed off dismissively -- to say "contemptuously" would mean that the "teacher" had shown more credit and respect than she did. So I went to my mommy, who in some Pollyannish views should be expected to be supportive and nurturing of her child. And I was told to listen to my teacher. (-- Implying, look, humans <children>: your own brains, your minds, are worthless. Disregard what they tell you.) Moral: Distrust authority. Question authority. I toy with, Disrespect authority. (One exception: the military. When the sergeant screams, "Hit the dirt!" then please, do hit the dirt.) So no. I assert that the proper spelling of "bylaws's" is just that, and similarly with all other words of the same construction; that this is not a monstrosity, but a breath-of-fresh-air correction, and that the evanescent contemporary convention that it should be dumped (dropping the essential "s" at the end because the word is cuter without it), is itself an unjustifiable perversity. (For the love of God, Montresor, will someone in the "Calm Down Gary" club weigh in.) ______________ * I forget the technical term here. Semantic, generative, dative, grammatical, or something. The sentence would be better if I put the right word there. But man, a tough week. [A year and a half later: I'm citing this rant, so I've cleaned up some of the typo'ed messes. Corrections in angle brackets when necessary. -- GcT]

Man, he's good sometimes. More often than he usually gets credit for.

You cannot have followed correct parliamentary procedure, since what your group has been doing for some time is already in violation of it. (Um, note that that is not what Robert's Rules says.) Any attempt to impose proper procedure on the structure of proceeding that you already have would result in gibberish. (Again, that's my assessment: you won't find that in RONR.) See, it looks to me as if your group's membership wanted to decide that the minutes are OK as they are -- and that you wanted to decide that you don't need them read. What you wanted to do, to certify that your group says officially that the minutes are correct, is called "approving" the minutes. To dispense with the reading of the minutes is to say that we will read them later -- adopting a motion to dispense with the reading of the minutes is only an order that the reading will be done later. Given your group's situation, I suggest that as soon as possible, you adopt a motion that ratifies all the previous "dispensings," saying that all those previous dispensings were really approval of those minutes as officially correct. Then, stop calling your group's official approval of the minutes, as correct, "dispensing of their reading," and begin to call it what it is. And most importantly, make sure that the minutes are, indeed, correct, before approving them. If they have been sent out to all the members, by e-mail, paper mail, or tedious reading over the phone, that's fine. But if your group does not do that previous distribution, you really, really, better read them at a meeting. (And note that this objecting member -- or any member -- has the right to demand that the minutes be read.) Yes, a special committee can be formed to approve all those old minutes, desperately hanging there with all sorts of inaccuracies threatening your group, who has endorsed that version, which might have all sorts of falsehoods there, claiming to be what your group did.. A special committee might be the better way, but it's certainly not required. And lastly, if your group used to find the minutes tedious on reading them, then they probably have about twice as much wordage in them as they are supposed to have. Minutes are what the assembled group has done, not what any particular one has said. If that's the problem, then you need to get the secretary to read about four pages in RONR (beginning about p. 451), or some fewer in RONR - In Brief. And Ms Heisser, you didn't do too bad at all. (Edited to reduce my own gibberish.)