Usage of "to" in "I've got some slides to talk to"

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?

Solution 1:

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.

Solution 2:

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.