Meetups

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, I’m Bob from Billings, Montana.

Hi, Bob. Welcome to the show.

Welcome. What’s going on?

I had a question about a new word, new to me anyway.

The word is meetup.

Basically, I heard this. I’m on the board of a local club that’s been around for a long time but has a gradually declining membership.

The board recently elected a new president who’s quite enthusiastic and wants to turn that around.

He started by totally revamping the club website, did a very nice job. But there was one thing on the website that I find very distracting.

He calls the monthly meetings meetups and capitalizes it regardless of where it is in the sentence.

I find that distracting. It takes my attention away from the meaning of whatever sentence it’s in and seems sort of affected.

He maintains that everybody in their 20s and younger is quite familiar with the word and very comfortable with it.

And he hates the word meetings.

For me, the word meeting is neutral. I’ve been to meetings I hated, and I have been to others that I enjoyed a lot.

Right. And I think if you call a meeting a meetup, it sounds as if I think they’re boring and I want to call it something else.

So you won’t think it’s boring also.

We can get to the bottom of this, and I think we can help make you a little better with this.

All right? I’m not saying that you’re wrong, but I think there’s an attitude that we can take here which might just change your point of view on this.

There are two things at play here.

One is the website meetup.com. This is a site which launched around 2002 and became really big by about 2004 during the political campaigns of that year.

And they have meetups. And these are informal gatherings based upon shared interests.

So you might have a pug meetup group or you might meet because you’re a supporter of a certain politician or because you’re a fan of knitting.

I don’t even know what it is, but you meet up.

But the thing about these meetups is that they’re not obligatory. You come because you enjoy sharing your experiences with other like-minded people.

And they tend to have really loose agendas if they have any agenda at all.

Sometimes you simply show up at the same place and just start talking.

You have a conversation. You have a coffee. You have a beer. What have you.

And that’s the whole event. There’s no agenda.

There’s not a podium or a lectern. There’s no PowerPoint presentation. There’s no handouts.

There’s no obligatory clapping for people who’ve won awards. None of that kind of stuff that you might find at a typical organization’s monthly meeting.

And so you are 100% correct when you say that they sound different from each other.

And he’s right in choosing that to make it sound a little more, you know, a little less kind of like, oh, a meeting and more like, oh, a meetup.

Right. It’s just a tiny bit difference.

The way that I would put it generally is a meeting is a formal gathering and a meetup is informal.

Now, the meetup noun, the noun meetup definitely predates the use for the website meetup.com.

I can find uses that are more than 100 years old of the noun meetup.

But generally, and this may be one of the things that’s kind of tweaking you, generally meetup has been a verb until the 2000s.

Almost always when meetup was used, it was a verb meaning to simply show up at the same place in the same time with other people.

And it was two words, not one.

Yes. The verb you meet up with.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So the capitalization. There are lots of verbs that have been turned into nouns.

Sure.

Sure, yeah, no problem with that, right?

Sure.

So anyway, at the very least, then, he’s got a style issue where he needs to take the capital letter off of meetup, unless it’s at the beginning of a sentence or other places where it deserves to be capitalized.

Yeah, I have a feeling that’s going to be more and more common.

And I think that the other question here is that basic question of writing.

Who is your audience? What group do you want to reach?

And I think it’s probably actually pretty smart to use meetup if you’re going after younger members.

There is another distinction that I think that you could make here, Bob, to talk to your new director.

And this is that a meetup is kind of a meeting that typically is for recruiting new people, for getting them interested in organization.

This is the social aspect. We introduce the organization to newcomers.

And then the meeting is the kind of thing that you have once they’re committed, once they’re paying dues or once they’ve signed on to be an officer or to volunteer or what have you.

And you could easily make that distinction and agree with your director.

How about we do both here? How about we make our older long-term members comfortable with meetings and we also welcome the newcomers with meetups?

I like that.

Bob, why don’t you give that a try?

All right.

And, you know, frankly, it’s not that big a deal anyway.

No, but it’s these small things that niggle us until we, right?

The burr gets under your saddle and you just have to get to the bottom of it, right?

Well, yeah, that burr under the saddle can be dangerous, but, you know, this is just an annoyance.

Yeah, the burr under the saddle will turn into a big sore before you know it.

You’ll lose your mouth.

Hey, Bob, thanks so much for calling.

Great. Thanks very much.

All right, take care now. Good luck.

Take care. Good luck.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

The workplace is just filled with these kinds of things, small and large, that annoy us about language, and sometimes they please us immensely.

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