What is a town hall meeting?
The morning paper had this front page headline: "TOWN HALL MEETING Conaway Discusses Sequestration, Immigration."
One might think that if a town hall meeting deserved a front page headline the newspaper would have published an announcement about it prior to that meeting. I looked through the papers from the past two days (Sunday and Monday), and couldn't find anything. If there was an announcement it must have been in the classifieds hiding between the found terrier and the lost retriever.
Representative Mike Conaway has held real town hall meetings in the past, but he found out that many of his constituents were not too pleased with the Republican spending programs he championed. So at some point his town hall meetings became private meetings called "town hall meetings." Newspaper Newspeak.
Meanwhile, here's the definition of a town hall meeting from Wikipedia:
A town hall meeting is an American term given to an informal public meeting derived from the traditional town meetings of New England. Everybody in a town community is invited to attend, voice their opinions, and hear the responses from public figures and (if applicable) elected officials about shared subjects of interest. Attendees rarely vote on an issue or propose an alternative to a situation. It is not used outside of this secular context.
So who do we blame for this distortion of the old phrase, Mr. Conaway or the newspaper? Maybe the Urban Dictionary folks can come up with a new definition that somehow correlates these private meetings with town hall meeting.
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