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6 July
Enjoy a delicious meal in our elegant new dining area ! Well, thick colds apart, they're virtual synonyms : how *not* enjoy delicious food ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 10, 2013
Language is a funny old business – some effectively say that, for want of a better term for it, laissez-faire applies, and therefore that Lewis Carroll’s Humpty-Dumpty was right :
When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.
Leave aside what attitude, policy or belief the celebrated writer may have been typifying (or, as some would say, parodying), this utterance does state the liberal position concerning what words signify, that they change with Time, and that woe betide those who do not move with them (or with it).
Except, of course, that the corollary is that, if I read Troilus and Criseyde of Chaucer, I cannot very well expect him to mean these words as, untutored, I might construe them :
There nys nat oon kan war by other be
On the other side, there are those kindly and neutrally labelled as the linguistic purists, police or even fascists, who seek to preserve meanings.
Anyway, what about this ?
Check out our range of luxury vodkas*
Enjoy two Bombs for £5**
Since I am ancient, I remember the Bowie song where he is talking about boys checking each other out, a very self-conscious reference to another culture in expressing what men do all the time, whether at the bar or the urinal, because they are so desperately insecure that some of them cannot even urinate, if another man is there.
Now, we are urged all the time to check out the video by Z, and for no other reason than it is the latest Z video, and we are enjoined – almost unceasingly – to ‘enjoy’ every paltry damn’ thing, even a coffee and a Danish pastry for £3. Word gits such as I think that I would probably be more likely to enjoy the so-called combo for £2 – or that, if more wealthy, I would still enjoy it for £5…
Enjoy a glass of perfectly chilled South African bubbly on our exclusive terrace
Oh, I bloody ask you – is everything marketing, packaging, and generally turning that ear into a silk purse ? Are we really so bloody stupid as a species that we cannot sense when we are being manipulated into some bloody posture that says how fine and how much better we are because invited by these pathetic jingles and slogans ?
Does one become tempted (as marketingspeak has it), or think what crap is being dressed up as a snobby treat ?
For me, the turning-point was being told that I should Enjoy ! -not the meal, but some unspecified thing, or just generally ? Formally speaking, the verb was transitive, and I could not just ‘enjoy’ in the same way that I can ‘live’, where I can legitimately say I have lived here all my life, but, equally, I have lived a good life, with a direct object, if I so choose.
Do waiting or serving staff still say that ? I don’t know, but I can happily believe that the tendency / habit / fashion just died off.
My preferences apart, I am just interested by this word ‘enjoy’, which I take to be a misunderstanding of what the verb, and of what ‘enjoyment’, meant to other ages – not a casual and trite encouragement to eat and / or drink something*** :
1. ‘To take delight or pleasure in’ – now, there’s a challenge to mediocrity !
Can I really be delighted by that Danish pastry that they bought in by the dozen to serve with coffee ? – isn’t taking pleasure in something other than simply enjoying everything put before one ?
2. ‘To have the use or benefit of’ – a different sense that leads to
3. ‘To experience’, i.e. ‘to enjoy poor health’, which would seem to connote the opposite of meaning 1, if poor health can be enjoyed.
The verb comes to us from Old French enjoier (‘to give joy to’) or enjoïr (‘to enjoy’), via Middle English, and ultimately from Latin gaudēre - a word on which I have commented elsewhere…
The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology**** gives us an obsolete sense, from the fourteenth century, of ‘to be joyful’.
Then, in the fifteenth century, to possess or experience with joy’, and a reflexive meaning of ‘to enjoy oneself’ in the seventeenth century (following se (ré)jouir).
In between, the noun ‘enjoyment’ emerged, in the sixteenth century. We find it in Shakespeare, although sometimes tinged with meaning 2 (above) : quotations to come.
And now, when I am having ordinary meat and drink, am I really meant to enjoy it as such ? Easily save myself, then, £29.95 on a four-course lunch from a good restaurant…
Post-script
The word 'cheap', as in Cheapside, is all to do with buying and selling - the German word kaufen means 'to buy' (and Grimm's Law explains how one becomes the other).
So I say that enjoyment has been sold short...
End-notes
* What about Take a look at ? Doesn’t checking out happen at the supermarket till ?
** What about Get ? How do I know that I will enjoy them ?
*** I quote from The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, Eighth Edition (1990).
**** Edited by C. T Onions (1966).
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