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There seems to be a bit of a word collision going on with the words mimetic and memetic. We are going to need to sort this out once and for all. Mimetic already means two things. The first is a study of the way in which animals imitate each other. So if you get a man in to study why your parrot is saying “Polly wants a cracker” then the guy is studying mimetics.

But what would happen if instead of studying the parrot, he was working out how much water would be left in the bird’s drink bowl after a certain amount of time? Well, he’d still be using mimetics. Because to work out the flow of water through a permeable membrane you can’t do all of the equations simultaneously, so you have to work out one equation that represents one bit of it and say, sort of, all of these other equations are a bit like this. The process of using these copycat equations is called mimetics too!

But what about memetics? Well, that’s the study of memes. You know those things where people ask each other to answer a series of blog questions and then they tag their friends to do the same. If you study those, then you are studying memetics. Actually memes are about more than just those strange things on blogs. They are about anything that sweeps the zeitgeist. A meme is any way in which an idea spreads around the world. They were proposed by Richard Dawkins and are, to his mind, the idea equivalent of natural selection. And the concept is about how an idea copies itself. So if the man is asking the parrot what its twitter handle is, it may well be to find out if the twitter meme has reached the parrot yet and so he would probably be studying memetics.

But there is one word missing from all of these. What if the man stops concentrating on the parrot and then decides to run on the spot? What if he suddenly seems to be stuck in an invisible box? What if he’s studying mime? What’s the word for that? There doesn’t seem to be one. But I’m going to guess that it’s going to be mimetics or memetics and I’m not sure that’s wise. I think those words might be full.

After a gig one night, I was sitting in a chip shop with the lead singer of a band. We’d come here because at the time there were very few late licenced venues. All of London would close at eleven – remember that? Madness. That will be one of those things that generations to come won’t believe. Just as I couldn’t believe it when my great aunt recounted to me the introduction of electricity in her house. She had been alive before you had electricity in your house – unbelievable.

Anyway, this chip shop would sell you cans of beer to drink at the table, so we bought a stack and sat down. The lead singer wasn’t from the UK, so there was easy small talk about how things were different here than back home.

She talked about some of the more obvious differences between Iceland and here. Finally I decided to ask her, what was her favourite thing from the UK? She thought for a second, and then I could see that she had decided.

Her favourite thing was the History Channel + 1. The channel that shows what was on the history channel an hour ago. “Why,” I asked, “is that your favourite thing?”

“Because,” she said, “it’s the history of the History Channel, live.”

We currently don’t have an Italian restaurant and it worries me. Well, of course, that’s not exactly true. Senor Grilli on Goodge Street in central London has been a regular haunt of mine since 1998. At our old flat, we had a great one, Aldo’s, but we moved away and it went out of business – this may be related. But since we’ve moved – nothing local.

Why is this important? Well, I’m not entirely sure, but it is to me. All of my life there have been places I’ve been where people know who you are when you walk in the door. And always these places have been Italian. Perhaps this is related to spending some of my formative years in New Jersey.

If I go into Signor Grilli, John asks me how I’ve been. Aldo and I are friends on Facebook. There’s something comforting about it. It’s related to that line in the Billy Joel song, “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant”.

“I’ll meet you any time you want at our Italian restaurant.”

There’s something homely and comforting about it. You can meet somebody there and just have a beer while you wait, nobody is going to mind. And somebody might even keep you company.

There’s a place down the hill that we’ve seen but haven’t been to yet. Maybe that’s the place? I’ll let you know.

There is something I love about random management phrases. I mean obviously I don’t like to actually use them, because they sound totally mad and often they really confuse the issue. However there are two words to do with the areas of your control and expertise that I really like.

The first is wheelhouse. It’s the name of the room where the captain of a ship stands. Literally, I guess, the room that houses the wheel of the ship. And this one is something you want more things in really. People say, “hey that’s right in Alex’s wheelhouse”. Well they don’t because they don’t use any of the cool phrases at my work, they just ask me to “action the pre-meeting”. But that’s what they would say to mean, “that’s right up Alex’s street”. It’s sort of about it being in your comfort zone, but comfort zone sounds a bit too wimpy. It’s actually used in baseball a lot to suggest that the ball was thrown to the place that the batsman really likes to hit from. So I guess you want more people to think that such-and-such will be in your wheelhouse.

Now bailiwick is the other word I like. Technically, this comes from the world of bailiffs and still exists in that world today. It means essentially ‘area of jurisdiction’. And of course, you might think, you as a young thrusting person would like to have more things under your control, the phrase is seldom used that way. It’s really used to explain what you aren’t in control of. Somebody says to you, “hey Alex, can you take this broom and sweep up the kitchen?”, you have to turn to this person and say, “I’m sorry Sir, but that’s not my bailiwick”. Basically, it’s a fancy way of telling somebody to shove off while also explaining that it’s “not my problem”. Of course I have never really used it [not at work, anyway - Ed] because it would make you sound like a mad person.

So while I fear those who freely use phrases such as, “We need to pro-actively seek to add value going forward”, I secretly also want the freedom to pepper my dialogue with these really cool words. Sadly, I don’t think it’s going to happen. Perhaps saying such words isn’t in my wheelhouse?