This week in a washingtonpost.com blog post entitled "The Joy of Meetings" (a contradiction if I've ever heard one), Marie Wilson writes:
The key to meeting effectiveness is a good agenda. A well-agendaed meeting where all participants get to the point succinctly, and leave the room with tasks in hand (or in Blackberry, as it were) is productive, creates an essential esprit de corps, and hopefully precludes the need for several future follow-up meetings!
Notwithstanding the poor sentence construction, I was struck by her use of well-agendaed, an invented phrase. No dictionary lists agenda or any of its related forms as either a verb or an adjective. A Google search, however, lists about 4700 hits for agendaed in its verb form.
This process of turning a noun into a verb is called verbifying. To verbify has its earliest use in 1813, according to the OED. Is agendaed another example of business jargon? Its use reminds me of the verb onboard in the corporate setting, a use I never heard until I joined the corporate ranks three years ago after spending 12 years in academia. Its use is simple--instead of bringing a new colleague on board, you just onboard them.
People normally rail against corporate jargon, but in defense of the two examples above, both make the writing more succinct--something that most writers in the corporate world should learn to do. Taking another example, the verb tase has quickly entered mainstream communication, much to the chagrin of the makers of the Taser. Using the verb makes for a quick and direct sentence:
- Don't tase me, bro!
OR - Don't use the Taser on me, bro!
So sometimes corporate jargon has its use, much to the consternation of prescriptivists who would prefer that language stays frozen in time (at least frozen in their lifetime). But that doesn't take agendaed off the hook; what bothers me about it is the -ae combination that we rarely see in American English.
Is it wrong? We won't know for several years, when it will either enter mainstream communication or fade away. And if you want to see verbification in action, "Don't tase me, bro" is uttered at 1:56.
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