Let's talk about money

The current topic in my Language in Society class is language change. It is a fun chapter where we talk about, among other things, new words and new meanings of existing words. Had a great example in the midst of an otherwise grim budget meeting. This is the time of year when we department chairs submit our budget requests to our dean as well as provide an accounting of where things currently stand. This makes it sound like I would actually be able to do this, which is ridiculous. Our fantastic departmental financial person is the one who produces the numbers, the spreadsheets, asks the hard questions and generally gets Fernando and me into shape on these matters. Monday morning we had our audience with the college financial person. I have now had quite a few meetings with him and the combination of his non-native English speaking-ness and his general financial-ese means we all usually leave scratching our head and carrying a piece of paper on which he has done endless diagrams that I suppose represent cash flow and so on. So there we are on Monday morning and we are talking about the latest money minding strategy that people smarter than I have come up with (but can I just say, that fast and loose mortgage thing hasn't worked out well elsewhere) which is to "mortgage" faculty who are approaching but still hopefully still somewhat distant from retirement. The idea being that they won't leave before things improve and we can "unmortgage" them and retain our ability to replace them when they do go. So Fred says: "Now I'm not a native speaker of English, but the linguists have told me I have stop using that word, because it is related to the word for 'death' historically and that just isn't a way to be talking about people." But never fear, he had come up with a replacement. A phrase so banal, so euphemistic, so deliciously inane, that I can't stop using it. A little background on budget speak. Sometimes, when times are really good, the university is able to take some of our soft cash flow and "harden" it, i.e. turn it into perpetual state funding no longer subject the ups and downs of each financial year. So, Fred announces that he is now only going to "talk about reverse hardening."
I also know that I have some serious Craig rubbed off on me, because I found myself asking if viagra could help with that.