In what can only be characterized as a typical turn of events in the life of TharpSter, I had an interesting encounter in a board meeting which took place at a dining table practically smack dab in the middle of a Mexican food restaurant last night.
Now I know the premise of a Mexican food restaurant here in San Antonio is a ludicrous idea, but bear (or is it “bare”?) with me here. I’m just setting the stage.
The board meeting involved Wifey the CFO, Juniorette, and a couple of branch managers from the organization. An unbiased party was also present so as to keep the language clean and most of us relatively honest.
Emphasis on “relatively”.
As dictated by the agenda of the meeting (complete with time stamped footers), the discussion came up around the subject of Three Amigos. Now naturally, no discussion about one of the greats in American cinema is ever complete without mentioning two specific passages of dialogue from that movie.
Passage one: “Wookuphere! Wookuphere! Wookuphere! Youtwo! Youtwo! Caaaa! Hey you guys!”
Passage two: “Jefe, what is a ‘plethora’?”
“Casa on the mesa”, and “must be a male plane” are rarely discussed, but appreciated none the less.
Notice right here and now that I didn’t bother to describe the scenes involved or tried to add context to those passages. If you don’t know them by now, the mere fact that you’re here becomes a complete exercise in academics and no longer a vessel for you to receive my attempts at written entertainment.
Irregardless (that term was just used at the expense of a coworker), any effort to hold a board meeting within the TharpSter organization without adhering to the rigid agenda of spending a solid ten minutes discussing that movie is just plain ill conceived.
As part of the discussion last evening, I brought up an interesting point which generated laughter. On the surface, it came across as if I was being laughed at by the other meeting attendees.
Deep down, after taking the next 24 hours to consider the event, I’m pretty sure the laughter was the nervous type designed to conceal a hidden truth locked away in all of the psyches sitting there dining on various combination plates accented with chips and salsa.
So what made ’em laugh?
That’s what you’re thinking.
During the discussion around El Guapo’s demand for the meaning of the word “plethora”, I made a comment that it was probably only about 10 years ago before I realized that the word was not a Spanish word.
Little did I know (until just moments ago) that the word actually has a Medieval Latin origin.
You know what that means now, don’t you? That means that going forward, the word “plethora” now qualifies here in the organization as a bitchin’ italicized Latin phrase. Yeah, I know it’s a word and not a phrase. Since I exercise control over everything that gets published with my name on it, I’ll take license wherever I want to.
In my own defense (like I need one), consider the foundation I had for that word. The first time I ever heard it was in a movie and spoken by El Guapo. The man uses a mixture of English and Spanish, so it only made sense that the word “plethora” was Spanish in origin.
Ladies and gentlemen, I will tell you this right here and now. There was at least one person sitting at the table last night that was granted a nugget of intelligence when I made that comment. I would suggest to you that before last night, they had assumed the word was Spanish as well. The shifty eyes and nervous laughter followed by a quick grab of something to drink told me everything I needed to know.
Afterward, we moved on to other agenda topics. Some were spoken, others were silent. The silent item in my case involved the plethora of lower GI pain I was feeling for eating more fried food than I had in months. The kicker is that it wasn’t really a whole lot, but it was obviously enough to get my attention and that of anyone in the immediate vicinity possessing a sense of smell or really good hearing.
That, of course, was another item dictated by the rigid agenda.
Meeting adjourned.
