Having survived another round of the Greek/EU debacle, it’s easy to feel as if a number of situation-specific words have been drilled into our lexicon. While we may have all become a little too familiar with words like bailout, haircut, and all of the acronyms of global finance, one of the most important words in this entire process seems to have been overlooked. Regardless of media sound bites and political posturing, very little could actually happen without today’s word – conference.
Conference – conférence – Konferenz
Our word conference, coming from the Middle French conférence, first appeared in English in the early middle 1500s, and is derived from the Latin conferre, meaning “to bring together.” Through the last couple of months, we have been trained to think of the word conference in only a debt-related scenario; however, the word itself can have multiple applications. For example, a grouping of sports teams, such as a football league, or a trade show, like the International Consumer Electronics Show, is referred to as a conference. From the smallest of individual business decisions handled through a conference call to decisions that will shape the world for years to come, such as the Yalta Conference, the versatility of this word has been shaped to meet the need anytime there is a connection between multiple people.
Interestingly though, before arriving at our current, broad understanding of the word, it initially had some very specific though now obsolete meanings. In Sir Thomas Elyot’s Dictionary of 1538, the word debuted in English meaning a comparison of items (usually texts): “The conference of phrases or forms of speaking latin and english.” Several years later, Thomas Raynald in Byrth of Mankynde (1545) uses the word as contributing or supplying: “The conference of most matter in begetting.” As the century progresses, we can see the definition moving to something more familiar: Peter Martyr d’Anghiera writes in his De Orbe Novo (On the New World, 1555), “You may..know by conference had with the Apothecaries,” using the term as taking advice of counsel. Finally, in 1592, the term was first used in a formal and potentially high-ranking international sense, as Angel Day wrote in The English Secretorie, “Whom yourself knew an howur before our conference, to have been discharged our company.”
