The recent international meeting on Darfur may not have done anything to stop the genocide, but it did have one positive result from my selfish point of view: a lovely addition to my personal stock of empty but positive-sounding phrases (Francois Murphy and Arshad Mohammed, "Session on Darfur ends without action plan", Reuters, 6/26/2007):
Despite the absence of specific action from the meeting, a UN special envoy, Jan Eliasson, said it had been useful.
"There has been a long period now of sometimes competing initiatives. Now there was general agreement that we should have a convergence of initiatives," he told reporters.
I guess that this translates as something like "Working separately, we've done nothing but talk; now most of us are saying that we need to talk about how to do nothing but talk in a more unified way".
This is a pretty common situation, actually. Quite a few of the meetings I've attended in recent years could have ended their work with a similar mention of general agreement about the appropriateness of pursuing a covergence of initiatives.
I'd offer thanks to Mr. Eliasson, but a Google search finds 11,600 prior instances of {"convergence of initiatives"}, which is apparently a standard piece of diplospeak that I've previously failed to notice, despite its obvious value.
Posted by Mark Liberman at July 2, 2007 09:00 AM