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“The Absent are Safe Here” declares a plaque on the liv­ing room wall of Robert­son McQuilkin, so the story is told by Had­don Robin­son (and writ­ten about by Ray Pritchard). To deter him­self and guests from speak­ing ill of oth­ers behind their back, McQuilkin put the plaque on dis­play to look to when words drifted astray. I espe­cially admire the list of types of neg­a­tive talk Pritchard gives to avoid:

No cheap shots
No shar­ing of gos­sip
No repeat­ing of rumors
No judg­ing of motives
No shar­ing of details that should remain pri­vate
No trash talk
No insin­u­a­tions
No angry invec­tives
No mak­ing your­self look good at the expense of oth­ers
No max­i­miz­ing the sins of oth­ers
No adding aggra­vat­ing details to make the absent look worse
No dis­miss­ing an unkind remark by say­ing, “I was only joking.”

If we all watched our speech with these rules, I think we’d go quite a way in build­ing a com­mu­nity of trust and grace. I don’t know what McQuilkin’s plaque looked like, but I made a ver­sion for my cubi­cle. If you’d like a .pdf file, let me know.