Six Words To Use In Business Meetings That You’ve Never Heard Before

These words are brilliantly archaic and devilishly cheeky. They should be employed in those workday moments when you want to have a good laugh. Or if you simply want to shoot the breeze and have a more interesting water-cooler conversation.

Pedeconferencing

Pedeconferencing is the sensation of holding a meeting while on the move, with coffee in hand and with a trail of people behind you or around you. The standing conference that’s more like a 100 metre sprint.

Essoinment

You know that formal and redundant moment at the start of every meeting when someone says “apologies for Joe Bloggs, he’s not in attendance today”. Well there is one neat and simple word to sum up Joe’s conspicuous and annoying absence and that is Essoinment. The act of essoining means to ‘offer an excuse for the non-appearance of a person at a gathering, to excuse absence’.

Logrolling

This is an American phrase that derives from ‘You roll my log, I’ll roll yours’. It refers to a mutually dull and excruiciatingly boring exchange where one party in a meeting needlessly thanks another party. So for example:

“John, congratulations on your recent trip to the toilet this morning. I do believe it was successful?”

“Yes Thomas it was indeed. I did a massive dump, possibly the biggest I’ve done in years”

“Oh bravo John, bravo. Everybody put your hands together”.

Nod-crafty

There is so much meaning in a nod. It can be suave and all-knowing, mysterious, or enthusiastic. In meetings people want to have the air of being knowledgable while also actively listening to the speaker. Whether this is a mere contrivance of genuine interest, it’s sometimes hard to tell. The Oxford English Dictionary defines nod-crafty as ‘Given to nodding the head with an air of great wisdom.’

Ultracrepidarianism

Occasionally, you will get that one person in the meeting who loves the sound of their own voice and who dominates the room. This person is an ultracrepidarian who gives opinions on subjects that he or she knows nothing about.

Tacenda

The elephant in the meeting room that must never be mentioned, yet even though it’s not mentioned it still has a sort of bewitching power of everyone and weighs heavily on them. That child labour crisis in Bangladesh that happened last year, the redundancy packages given to workers in the other office, the smell of the guy’s armpits who does accounts. That’s a tacenda.