What's a conference weigh?

My organization being what it is -- which is to say, envious of military culture (or feral pack dogs; take your pick) -- certain linguistic fillips tend to percolate through the alphas and then back down to the yeomen, where they rattle and bounce around and amplify like very badly formed electrons being run through an accelerator. Sometimes I think that the more alarming the verbal tic, the more enthusiastically the corps adopt it. In a charitable mood, I think it's like the Queen (any queen, never mind which) lapping her tea from the saucer to graciously negate the faux pas of the rustic but pure-hearted banquet newbie. The other ninety-nine percent of the time, I imagine it's the surest way to make certain the alpha knows you have no reservation about rolling over and offering your underbelly. Or dignity.

Anyway, when I first joined, it was "issues" and "schedules." The cognoscenti only had ISS-yews, which they tried to accommodate in their SHED-yules. "Ooo, fun!" said younger, much more enthusiastic Esquiver, "we're pretending to be British. Let me play; I'm good at this game." We weren't. And I had to come up with an elaborate backstory involving a former spouse.

Lately, of course, it's "leverage," doing duty as noun, verb, and foreign policy. I cringe, but can live with that. The more odious one, right up there with the grating misuse of "begging the question" is "worth its weight in gold." Somewhere, in my absence, the whole Mother Ship has been Midas-ized. Ok, fine: people are worth their weight in gold, though their frequency implies a lot of statuary around the place (although that may actually solve more mysteries than it engenders). Much more amusingly, single-page documents are worth their weight in gold. Or, as I recently snapped at a colleague in exasperation, "So....about 80 bucks, then?"

This latest turn toward the metaphysical - the conference was worth its weight in gold - I find baffling. Is it one of those delightful cross-modality things, like how much does the internet weigh? Hey, I'm a fan of synesthesia. I can play that game. But, y'know, I don't want to spend the next two years doing the cross-modality equivalent of pretending that I always order bangers and mash for breakfast. (I get a little frightened just trying to imagine what that might look like.) Is it -- I scarcely dare hope -- a deliberate and subtle dig at the value of the one-page report? Y'know, on the order of "that book fills a much-needed gap"?

Thinking back on the in-house-generated headline I saw in this morning's summaries of the wires -- "Polish premier invites striking nurses for talks" -- I am, sadly, disinclined to so believe.