BOGSAT—a bunch of guys sitting around talking

I was reading a very serious blogpost this week, which, much to my annoyance, kept dropping acronyms into the text without explanation. Nonetheless, it did make me laugh when I looked up BOGSAT. It means a Bunch Of Guys Sitting Around Talking. According to the Urban Dictionary, it refers to regularly scheduled but worthless daily or weekly meetings.

“During BOGSATs, typically nothing of value to the organization is accomplished nor comes from it … except wasting time and (usually) expanding someone’s ego.”

A cousin, BOGSATT, Bunch Of Guys Sitting Around The Table, is applied to any situation in which people of questionable ability, experience, or knowledge make important decisions. It is suggested it comes from the Pentagon where it was used for meetings in the War Room held while hundreds of people were dying elsewhere.

Further research revealed that the word does have quite a distinguished history. Waldemar A. Nielsen, an expert on philanthropy who consulted to the US President, coined BOGSAT in September 1961, as a comic way of explaining how important decisions about Russia were being made during the President Kennedy administration.

Survival of these acronyms obviously shows that there are a lot of meetings still happening in the world that waste time or have the wrong people making decisions.