Just briefly,
a post over at Lords of the Blog got me thinking. What do we say when we think a seminar speaker is mad, bad or dog, and don’t want to be rude?
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The Scientist
Life and Times of a permanently bemused British postdoc in exile.
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Hear, hear
- Date:
- Thursday, 24 Apr il 2008 - 13:39 GMT
Last updated: Thursday, 24 Apr 2008 - 13:39 GMT
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Comments
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I wouldn’t call them noble Lord, for starters.
I’ve heard “it was a little too descriptive” after one particularly awful talk.
If you’re the chair, you intone “Thank you for that interesting presentation”.
“Interesting” is a good one, isn’t it? So… ambiguous.
That talk was thought-provoking. As in, I think I want to go back to sleep in my seat.
In one of my novels there is a character who always takes a timer to seminars so if it abruptly becomes boring, she can make it go off and pretend that a really important experiment suddenly needs attending.
Don’t joke. I used to do that in lab meetings.
Don’t we always ask novelists to “write from experience”? Hands up if you haven’t used that particular ploy (but only for meetings, for me; my department head leaves his beeper on and he is important enough he can get away with it).
I think meetinsg should be avoided at all costs (and if you have never seen this video, you really should). Once a meeting is established it is very hard to abolish. I have to attend a weekly meeting that started as a temporary measure … ten years ago.
What’s more, if left to themselves, meetings proliferate, budding off all kinds of other meetings and secondary subcommittees faster than you can say ‘metastasis’.
I suspect that meetings are really a ploy to make people trapped in middle management, whose lives otherwise consist mainly of being suspended upside down with their heads in buckets of hyena offal, feel good about themselves.
Meetings are evil. Especially one-off, mandatory meetings.
I agree, Richard. One-off mandatory meetings called on a whim are just plain rude, and reflect badly on the organizational skills of those calling them.
…really a ploy to make people trapped in middle management[...] feel good about themselves.
First, it’s quite good fun to edit the editor’s writing. Thanks for giving me the opportunity.
Just wanted to express the opinion that such ploys are manifold and should be denounced with vigour and exposed to sunlight and fresh air so that they wither and die.
Those who can, do.
Those who can’t meet and talk about it.
I believe I dropped a comma. Has anyone seen it?
@Heather – I know it was a relative clause, but heck, I loved that hyena offal. Give it back.
Ah, Jeff, I might be able to help, there.
@Henry: you’re welcome to it and the new generations of microbiotia it has spawned. However I do so enjoy ellipses and square brackets. I’ll save them for the next time I want something foul for myself.
@Richard, spare one more?
Hmm, maybe. I thought Americans lacked ‘u’s. And I know who’s been stockpiling them, by the way.
Richard, are you saying we’re useless?
U/S, maybe…
Thank yo for noticing that I am fll ot of that vowel. Who’s the clprit?
Not so much ‘useless’, as non-U.
Heather – it’s The NuZillunders. I have an elegant proof of this but this comment box is too small to contain it.