WIPO PCDA conlusion – learning English the hard way
The first meeting of the WIPO Provisional Committee on a Development Agenda is over. The mood was rather conciliatory, compared to the rants and raves that took place during last year’s series of conferences on the subject. This made for snail-paced progress, though progress there was.
At least, there now seems to be a draft list of discussion topics for the next meeting, due to take place in June. This agenda was agreed on Friday, after a day of small group meetings, thanks to the excellent Chairman’s frenetic mediation. Read all about the diplomat’s antics on IP Watch and Georg’s blog.
One of the great things about going to WIPO conferences is that you always learn something new. And I’m not just talking about copyright and patents.
Since my English vocabulary is not quite as large as I would like it to be, I occasionally run into slang I find hard to decode. That was what happened yesterday, when on BoingBoing I read the entry US boning the WIPO Development Agenda. Now, I was unsure about the exact meaning of "boning", though by now I am more than a bit acquainted to the US delegation’s tactical games.
My first thought was that, since bone is a hard material, the expression referred to their seemingly immutable position, well grounded in mountains of industry greenbacks. But US-resident A2K people said this was incorrect, though they were strangely reluctant to tell me what it did mean.
From their reluctance I inferred that I was onto something with a relation to sex. I know what a "boner" is, and then "boning" would most likely describe some activity you engage in with one.
Eventually, I got one of them to confirm hypothesis. While I had been thinking of some particular practice, I was told that the word is just a synonym for an English word with four letters, the first one of which is not an "s".
Instead of asking the A2K people though, in hindsight I should really have approached the US delegation, showed them the entry and asked them if the term referred to some new strategy they were deploying… To make up for that missed opportunity, as the session was over for the day, I had this picture taken:
The blue pencils are courtesy of WIPO, and one of the pirate’s heads, a gift, accompanied me all trough this week in the inside pocket of my suit.