From news editor Daniel Silliman: I’m tickled every year about this time by one peculiarity of Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) nomenclature. The SBC is a convention. It also has a convention. So the meeting held this week in Texas is, technically, the Southern Baptist Convention convention. 

If they had a big meeting about the meeting, that could be called the Convention convention convention. 

This linguistic convention (sorry!) is a fun but also important feature of small-d democratic history. When people put a priority on meetings where equals come together and make decisions, the verb form of the word for the meeting is also often used as the noun for the group.

Consider: A regional organization of Methodists is called a conference. Who belongs to a conference? The people who go to the conference. Same thing with congress, which is a verb and a noun. Parliament can be a verb too. It’s possible to say that the parliament parliamented, the congress congressed, or that you went to a conference conference and had a convention convention. 

To keep it simple, we’ll probably just say meeting. But in my head, at least, I’m amused by the other possibilities.