OtherThanThat

I’ve been told I’m a rather persuasive person. I guess that’s true, but I’m a bit worried because it seems that I may have willed a truly ridiculous piece of verbiage into existence.
When I talked about finding home (It Is What It Is – 2/20/2005), I poked gentle fun at the corporate citizens among whom I spend my time every day. Specifically I noted the rather irritating and all-too-familiar tendency of people in the business world to make up words. Nouns become verbs. Verbs become nouns. It was in this discussion I tossed out the word “templatized”. Never did I think that such a horrific mangling of verbiage would actually see the dim light of a conference room.
I was wrong.

The location was a conference room at a company that shall remain nameless where I and two of my colleagues were arranging ourselves in preparation for a new business meeting. It was to be a rather low-key meeting, more of a meet and greet sort of situation.
We were about 1/3 of the way into things, we’d given a brief overview of our respective skills and were at the part where the prospective client was doing their own little song & dance about their business.
That’s when he said it. Templatized.
Perhaps I was hearing things. After all, I had just returned from a whirlwind trip to the East Coast and was tangling with the early stages of a rather nasty flu-like-sniffly-sneezy-coughy-wheezy sort of affliction. This damn meeting was the only reason I hauled my carcass out of bed, and as I sat there feeling distinctly like Typhoid Mary I heard the word.
Templatized.
I began to chuckle, figuring that he had to be kidding.
He wasn’t.
Thankfully one of my monster sneezing fits struck at that very moment, so I could disguise my snorting chortle under the protective custody of several tissues.
Somehow blowing my nose at that moment seemed terribly appropriate.