Please Enjoy This Link
Enjoy this article by Frank Bruni as he vents on the overuse of the word enjoy. Enjoy!
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4 Comments:
In my memory, the word "enjoy" first started being used ad nauseum in chinese restaurants in the late 80's here in NYC. It was something of a joke, a humorous thing that popped up almost overnight, when waitstaff in chinese restaurants, who barely spoke any english at all, started entreating us to "Enjoy!" extremely enthusiastically after placing every single individual item ordered on the table. Halfway through the meal, if you asked for another beer, it would be brought out with yet another "Enjoy!" It was kind of like our east coast version of L.A.'s notorious "Have a nice day!" It seemed to spread from there, after which it was no longer funny, and just became plain old annoying.
seyo at 10:32AM on 11/07/07
Wow. I'm clearly not eating at the best restaurants, since I've never heard the term used other than as a cheerful exhortation when our food was served: "Enjoy!" If someone wanted to clear my plate by asking if I was "finished enjoying that," I would have to make some kind of criticism--after I was done guffawing, of course.
klg19 at 1:02PM on 11/07/07
I've heard this posed to diners: "How'd you enjoy your meal?" Which leaves the respondent without an opportunity to answer "No, it was horrible." Either that, or they have to go into detail about how, exactly, (rather than "if") they enjoyed their meal: Well, first I squeezed some lemon on the fish, then I took a bite, chewed, swallowed, and repeated until it was gone...
Dominic
the zen kitchen
dvchurch at 10:41PM on 11/07/07
That article was hilarious. True, too. It's particularly amusing when this happens at an innocuous chain restaurant where the food-which-can-not-be-deciphered from the next chain restaurant down the road with a twenty-something year old server who has forgotten to set forks on the table because she/he was too busy laughing uproariously at something with his/her fellow servers in the pass-through while chewing gum in-between sentences. The puppy-like appeal in the server's eyes as he/she bends slightly forward dropping excess eyeshadow into the un-refilled drink to ask "How *is* everything? Are you *enjoying* it?" just touches the heart. It touches the temper too. :)
A related article on this subject at an arm's length came from (may I call him the venerable? For I do enjoy his writings) Joseph Epstein last week.
Quote:
The waiter, a young man with spiky hair and rather a sad, wispy beard, reporting the special dishes of the day to us, paused to cite one of them as "my own favorite." I saw my friend's jaw muscles tighten. After the waiter left, he said, "I can't tell you how much I hate that 'my own favorite' stuff." "Be grateful," I said, "that he didn't tell us that we made excellent choices or ordered very intelligently." Four or five times, this waiter broke into our conversation to ask if everything was okay. Which it was until he broke in to ask.
Enjoyment (sic) is just not what it used to be.
Karen Resta at 7:03AM on 11/08/07