Come and talk to us or can we talk with you?

I’ve been musing on this for a couple of days after seeing a programme put together by professionals for a community. On the programme I noticed ‘come and talk to us’ and I wondered if it should instead say, ‘can we talk with you?’

I was thinking back to when I attended an institutional led engagement event during the pandemic around community safety and it was so heavily agenda’d that there was little space for conversation. There was also a real sense that the institution thought that they were responsible for having all the answers, and providing the solutions. You could tell that with the actual balance of professionals to community members. 

Does it matter though? Am I being pedantic?