The spread of boardroom jargon into everyday language continues apace, opines Frank McNally.
Motorola's ominous announcement of an "employee consultation process" in Cork may or may not be yet another euphemism for sacking staff. But Micheál Martin was straight from the management-speak textbook when, reacting on radio, he expressed disappointment that the company had chosen "to bring this to the table today".
We can expect to hear more and more of such stuff, going forward, and nowhere is safe from it, if the latest US trend in corporate team-building events is anything to go by. Having exhausted the potential of golf outings, survival weekends, and workshops based on Shakespeare's Henry V, bosses are now turning to restaurant kitchens for staff-bonding opportunities. The result is something called the "corporate cook-off".
According to the International Herald Tribune, business executives see in the kitchen "a microcosm of the working world, with a deadline, limited resources and a requirement for co-operation". Of course, if you happen to be a chef or a dishwasher, the kitchen is your working world. But sometimes there's more money in being a microcosm, and this is one of those times.
A San Francisco company that specialises in hosting corporate events had to triple its chef-force (to 32) last year, such was the demand for kitchen time. Typically, the corporate cook-off pits teams against each other to produce multiple-course meals, with chefs supervising and judging the results.
The kitchen's sweaty atmosphere encourages collegiality, but it also hones the competitive edge, as witnessed by a senior vice-president quoted by the IHT. His team had won a consolation prize for best noodles, but the alpha male was unimpressed. "Some people would be happy with the noodle prize," he declared. "I'm perennially unhappy unless I'm No 1 in the meat category."
The dangerous thing about this trend is that it brings together two milieus - the boardroom and the restaurant - in which, separately, people will go to great lengths to avoid ever using plain English. This is marginally more acceptable from restaurants, since French and Italian are the vernacular languages of much cooking. It's fair enough to identify classic dishes by their original names, I suppose, wherever they are made.
If you grill a ham and cheese sandwich, you're probably entitled to call it a Croque Monsieur, or a Croque Madame if you add an egg (the French drag sex into everything). But the camouflaging effect of a foreign language should never be underestimated. There are remoulades being produced in Dublin restaurants that would never get a remoulade licence if the French were in charge of the applications.
The boardroom has already plundered the language of food - along with every other language - for buzz-words. Even executives who have never been in a kitchen will probably know what it is to cut the mustard, eat a reality sandwich, put plans on the back burner and, when all else fails, cook the books. But the corporate cook-off will surely launch a whole new sub-genre.
Bad enough that these two cultures should start cross-pollinating. The really appalling prospect is that, with so many restaurants struggling to make a profit, hiring the kitchen out for corporate events could soon look like an attractive sideline. Companies might even pay more for the white-knuckle experience of cooking to a "live" audience of regular customers.
Imagine if, unknown to you, your meal was prepared by teams from a big law firm. The menu would be in Latin, for a start. Assuming you got a starter, the kitchen would then probably seek to have the meal adjourned, pending a discovery order for the ingredients of the main course. And that would be nothing compared with the unpleasantness when it came to the bill.
If this corporate cooking thing takes off here, I foresee a time when some brass-necked executive will fry your eight-ounce steak to a frizzle and then present it to you as "downsized". Being a typical Irish person, you will hate to complain. But thanks to the ubiquity of corporate lingo, an apt response will automatically present itself. You will look at the steak and then at the waiter. And without even thinking, you will hear yourself expressing regret to the latter that he has chosen "to bring this to the table today".
On a not unrelated topic, I note with relief that Chicago's foie gras ban - imposed on restaurants last year - has not so far resulted in gang warfare. The ban has certainly divided opinion, with mayor Richard Daley calling it the "silliest" law ever passed by the city. But, mercifully, Chicago itself has not been divided, unlike during another prohibition era, when Al Capone's southside operation fought Bugs Moran's northsiders for control of the bootleg whiskey market.
Critics of the ban point to the lack of fines so far as proof that it isn't working. One business, Hot Doug's - "the Sausage Superstore and Encased Meat Emporium" - has even framed a warning letter from the authorities asking it to desist from selling the force-fed goose livers. The store trades happily on Chicago's turbulent past, by calling one of its sausage products after gangsters.
Animal rights activists counter that the ban is working, because they make a point of asking for foie gras in restaurants and are told it is unavailable. But there are echoes of the 1920s, when speakeasies operated passwords for admission.
Restaurants have a talent for euphemism, as we know, and according to Associated Press, at least one Chicago eatery has a new name for foie gras. Customers in the know now ask for the "special lobster".