Meeting That Could Have Been an Email
Etymology
An office lament that hardened into a fixed phrase during the 2010s and became ubiquitous with the meeting overload of remote work. It spread as a meme, on mugs and Slack reactions, precisely because it named a universal frustration. The construction — a whole complaint compressed into a noun — is what made it stick.
noun phrase · /MEE-ting thuht kood hav bin an EE-mayl/
A gathering whose entire content — an update, an announcement, a decision already made — could have been conveyed in a written message without anyone assembling.
What it names
A shared handle for the hidden cost of synchronous time: pulling many people into a room to receive information that didn’t require their simultaneous presence.
Example
Forty-five minutes, twelve people, one slide: another meeting that could have been an email.
Related idea
It is a small tragedy of the commons in reverse — one person’s convenience in calling a meeting spends everyone else’s attention, a cost the caller never sees.