Neologisms

I got a new camera last week and took it for a test drive in the Allen Gardens greenhouse. While the greenhouse itself seemed sad and unblossoming, the camera works a treat.

Keeping it Creepy: Succulent-clad Piano Player in the Palm House

At work, I feel as if we're trying to set new records every week in special public service categories such as:

• most meetings held in a forty-eight-hour period
• most back-pocket items created in a single day
• most last minute requests and
• most strange utterances in a single meeting

I'll share the first and second place winners in that last category. I was hanging around as room meat on a teleconference between my boss and his counterpart at one of the government's largest, most powerful and least ball-playing ministries. The disembodied voice of the other bureaucrat dominated the conversation and I sat spellbound as I heard the word "stakeholder" (normally a noun) used as 

• a verbal: "You've been stakeholdering like crazy on the cap and trade program"
• a past participle: "now that you've stakeholdered" and
• a straight up verb in the infinitive: "it's clear we can continue to stakeholder"

My boss, new to the public service, seemed to want to show the career bureaucrat what he's made of, including a super power he may have. So he blew away the strange utterance competition with a simple phrase, used to recount the events at a recent meeting :

• "you could see the echoes at the Minister's Table meeting..."

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Today's moral: Just because you can say something doesn't necessarily mean you should.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen