Eliza

“the Middle Ages meetings were armed encounters: local disputes were settled by means of a ‘moot’, at which proposals were approved with a banging together of weapons – or dismissed with groans. These attempts to negotiate arguments gradually became less military in temper. During the Renaissance, urbanization and political centralization gave rise to a more parliamentary style of meeting, over which courtiers presided. Urbane discussion became the mechanism for resolving or curtailing differences and achieving solidarity. Yet even in the nineteenth century the word meeting was a euphemism for a duel – a hangover from a less bureaucratic age. And today meeting is associated with other ways of taking lives or at least sapping vitality. The”
― Henry Hitchings, Sorry!: The English and Their Manners