By Michael Ferber
There used to be a shop on Route 4 near the Epsom Circle called “Perfectly Goods.” It made me laugh whenever I passed it, especially after I learned that it carried factory seconds, that is, imperfect goods. Imperfect though they were, apparently the goods were perfectly good for any normal purpose. The imperfect saucers and cups, for example, would be perfectly all right for every occasion except when the Queen was coming for tea.
You are walking with a friend, and he stumbles and falls, gets up, rubs his knee, and resumes walking. “Did you hurt yourself?” you ask. “No,” he says, “I’m perfectly all right.” Well, he’s not perfectly all right. If he is all right, he is imperfectly all right.
“Perfectly,” in these uses, really means “Don’t worry about it.” These cups and saucers will do what they are designed to do, whatever their flaws. Your friend will make it home all right, and then take a look at his knee. Everything’s OK.
You make a reservation over the phone, and give your credit-card number to the woman in charge. “Perfect,” she says. What was perfect? You managed to read off your card number correctly? How would she know? It seems an attempt to praise you, an amiable thing to do, but rather silly. This usage seems unrelated to the “perfectly good” expression, but they both exaggerate absurdly by invoking a term that belongs to the realm of, well, perfection, of 100%, of absolute flawlessness, a realm we seldom inhabit except in our daydreams or when we enter the realm of mathematics.
It is normal in probably every language to exaggerate by snatching words from their special contexts and applying them to everyday things or events. Back in 1988 I was walking my new golden retriever puppy across the UNH campus, and was, of course, waylaid by every student. “What an awesome puppy,” at least three of them said, as they stopped to pet it. One said, “what a wicked awesome puppy!” Well, the puppy was certainly very cute, even adorable, but awesome it was not. It had been only a few years, of course, since “awesome” had come to mean “great” or “good” or “really cute,” thanks to the Valley Girls of California who called everything they liked “totally awesome.” (I wonder if they ever said “perfectly awesome.”) So the word’s new meaning was still strange to me. I grew up thinking it meant “awe-inspiring” or “sublime,” and I was not about to fall on my knees before my puppy and worship it with fear and reverence.
I just noticed I called my puppy “adorable,” which is also absurd, if you remember what the word used to mean. We are to adore the Lord God, or Mary, or a sacred object. Now we may adore the latest song or a food like banana yogurt.
If “perfectly” is an exaggeration that really implies its opposite, the same is true of several other words. You would not say “surely” in many instances if you were really sure. “She has surely arrived home safely” hints that you are not entirely sure. If you were really sure—if she had called you to say she is home—you would say “She has arrived home safely.” Likewise, if you believed the Civil War began in 1861 you would not say “I believe the Civil War began in 1861.” “I believe” contains a hint of unbelief. To say “No doubt she has arrived home safely” conveys a little doubt about it. It would be more honest to say “I think the Civil War began in 1861” or “I have little doubt that she has arrived home safely.”
It is odd that making explicit your belief or certainty in this way carries the message that your belief or certainty is in fact a little shaky. I’m not sure why this is so. If you keep it simple and just state a fact, then your listener is less likely to wonder how you know the fact to be a fact than if you call attention to your state of mind, even if you claim that you know. Just stating a fact may also seem a little too blunt in polite company, where expressions of doubt, or statements in the form of a question, often lubricate conversation. “Wouldn’t you think she has arrived home safely?” “Yes, I shouldn’t doubt it, would you?” So what may have arisen as tokens of courtesy have become habits that literally refute themselves.
As for courtesy, let me end with an example about courtesy levels that don’t always translate across languages. When I lived in Japan many years ago, not far from Mount Fuji, I often took the train to nearby cities where I taught English to groups of adults. It happened several times that a young man (the young women were too shy) would approach me on the train and ask if he could practice his English. After touching on Japanese trains and Japanese food, once the young man of the day said, “Please climb Mount Fuji.”
It was impossible to explain to him in English why we would never say “Please climb Mount Fuji.” He knew that “please” makes a request polite, as in “Please sit down” or “Please pass the salt.” He had no notion that his request sounded like a burdensome command, as if we were to climb Mount Fuji as a personal favor to him. What do we actually say when we’re recommending something? “You must climb Mount Fuji!” Of course we mean that you would love it if you climbed Mount Fuji, you would cherish the memory of it, you would take great selfies, it must go on your bucket list for your own benefit, and so on. But to my Japanese friend it would sound like an imperious command, not the least bit polite, and I despaired of explaining it to him. So I said, “Thank you. I will climb Mount Fuji.” I never actually did, and I was perfectly happy.
These quirky habits in English are hard to explain. But at least we can be fairly sure (“surely!”) that Artificial Intelligence is a long way from getting the hang of them. Only humans talk this way.
I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu.
Michael Ferber moved to New Hampshire in 1987 to join the English Department at
UNH, from which he is now retired. Before that he earned his BA in Ancient Greek at
Swarthmore College and his doctorate in English at Harvard, taught at Yale, and served on the
staff of the Coalition for a New Foreign Policy in Washington, DC. In 1968 he stood trial in
Federal Court in Boston for conspiracy to violate the draft law, with the pediatrician Benjamin
Spock and three other men. He has published many books and articles on literature, and has a
deep interest in linguistics. He is married to Susan Arnold; they have a daughter in San
Francisco.
Columns and op-eds express the opinions of the writer, not InDepthNH.org. We seek diverse opinions at nancywestnews@gmail.com