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In Lucy Kellaway’s 2012 Golden flannel Award, the Preposition Award is given to a usage of to.

But the winner is the innocuous word “to” as increasingly heard in presentations: “I’ve got some slides to talk to” – the unfortunate implication being that the speaker has to talk to the slides because no one else is listening.

Am I right in thinking that the speaker originally intended to mean some images for projection on a screen? If so, what is the appropriate preposition in this sentence. “About” perhaps? Is this usage of to really often heard?

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The problem is the choice of phrasing and context. While I can speak to the use of to in this way, the sentence itself certainly sounds irregular and incorrect to me, in the sense that it fails to convey the correct meaning in a direct way. – Kris Jan 14 at 11:55

5 Answers

up vote -3 down vote accepted

I've never heard this usage. I can understand it, but it's not standard American English. Talking to slides makes almost as much sense as talking about them because prepositions really don't mean what the dictionary says they mean. Brits say "I live in Green Street" but Americans say "I live on Green Street". In neither sentence does the preposition have a real meaning. "About" is better: "I've got some slides to talk about", which can be translated into "I've got some slides to address" -- in this case, "address" can mean "deal with"; in another case, "talk to".

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When I first landed in America, besides my incessant use of terms like toilet, car park and bonnet, I would speak in a fashion like, "I prefer having snow to being tortured by summer heat." Some of my American colleagues seemed to make judgments to my poor usage of English. OTOH, I couldn't "figeur" out why certain people in the northeast kept pronouncing "processees" when it should be "processes", or keupons when it should be coupons. – Blessed Geek Jan 14 at 10:17
@Blessed Geek: "Toilet" is normal AmE to me: that's what we used in my house. The same goes for "I prefer having snow to being tortured by summer heat" (although most AmE speakers might not say "having", just "I prefer snow to..."). Them Downeasty speakers talk almost as funny as sub-Mason-Dixon line drawlers. – Bill Franke Jan 14 at 10:24
Toilet is the room not the device. Toilet, itself, is already an euphemism. In the US, I'm culturally prohibited from saying "I wish to use the toilet." I'm being encouraged to say, "May I use the bathroom" even though the gas station's "bathroom" has no means for me to have a "bath". The only bath is one on which you sit and have excremental effluents flushed off. I recall very vividly being admonished by the school teacher to teach my children not to use the word "toilet". – Blessed Geek Jan 14 at 18:42
BTW, I was told that the normal way is to say, "I prefer ... than ...". – Blessed Geek Jan 14 at 19:21
@Blessed Geek: Sounds like you had some really weird people advising you how to speak English. I can see "I prefer chocolate more than strawberry, but I prefer both of them to vanilla" is normal AmE where I came from (New Jersey). When I went to France in 1975, I saw houses & apartments that had one room that housed the bathtub (the bathroom) & one that housed the commode (the toilet). Same thing in Japan in 1983. But it's cheaper to put all that stuff into a single room: 1 less wall to build. Forget about the convenience of 2 people being able to use 2 rooms simultaneously. – Bill Franke Jan 14 at 23:42
up vote 3 down vote

Maybe I’m being daft but from context this sounds like the usage of “to” here is a mistake. In fact, the quote implies that it clearly is (the follow-up about “unfortunate implication” mocks this usage)1. What the speakers probably actually mean is “through”:

I’ve got some slides to talk through.

“talk through” simply means to discuss. I’m assuming that the original quote refers to the fact that lots of people mispronounce this phrase since “talk to” sounds right.

1 But like Andrew and Barrie showed, Lucy Kellaway might simply be wrong. However, I don’t think that she is since “talk through some slides” is much more common, and thus more probably meant, than the meaning of “talk to” illustrated in those other answers.

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up vote 1 down vote

Nobody else has suggested this, so I'll propose the following.
My interpretation of “I’ve got some slides to talk to” is that the subject has to make a presentation involving slides and talking but is not expecting the audience to listen. Therefore, in their opinion, the presentation is the same as literally just talking to the inanimate slides.

This may of course be an exaggeration or attempt at humour by the speaker.

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+1 for having the courage to try humor here with only 109 points. Seriously, though, if I ever plan a presentation, I may try this joke during the preparation phase, as an attempt at self-deprecating humor. (Some of us can pull it off successfully. Others wouldn't dare. ;-) ) – Jim Jan 25 at 21:58
up vote 10 down vote

There’s nothing new about this use of to, and I can only suppose that Lucy Kellaway, like so many before her, was suffering from the Recency Ilusion. The OED’s definition 31b of to is ‘in support of; in assertion or acknowledgement of’, illustrated in this citation from 1884 ‘The hon. gentlemen spoke to a resolution congratulating the Government on the passing of the Franchise Bill’.

This clearly doesn’t mean the hon. Gentleman said ‘Good morning, how are you?’ to the resolution any more than talking to slides describes a conversation with them. Only the most perverse would think that.

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up vote 15 down vote

While having slides to talk to may be unusual, one does often hear have something to speak to in this usage, yes. It's "bizspeak": Business English.

ODO has:

(speak to) answer (a question) or address (an issue or problem):
we should be disappointed if the report did not speak to the issue of literacy

In a meeting or presentation, one might hear the chairman introduce a topic as "And now we move on to the subject of cows in the car park which Mrs Sidebottom is going to speak to," that is, she is going to address that subject.

Business English seems to undergo change quite rapidly; it's possible to see how having slides to talk to is an evolution of having something to speak to, but as you and Bill Franke point out, it's rather absurd.

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