Dan and I have enrolled in the Donald Trump Remedial English Program.
I can’t pinpoint the exact date this happened, but we reached the saturation point at about the same time. Perhaps it was when we were enjoying a glass of fine ten-year-old Rioja. We enjoyed the delicious aroma, observed how it coated the inside of the glass, and swirled it around in our mouths a bit before swallowing. “This is really good,” I said to Dan.
“The best,” he replied, a response that for the past several months has brought us laughter. It’s been fun imitating our President’s, er, distinctive verbal style.
We each saw the doubt in the other’s eyes.
“All the other wines are losers,” I essayed. But it was too late. This no longer had the cachet of fresh humor that it once had.
“Pathetic?” he tried.
No. Clearly we were done.
“This is really sad,” I said, ignoring the warning finger Dan was waving at me. “It’s the end of an era. We can’t go on this way. It’s just not working anymore. We can’t just say, ‘the best.’ It doesn’t mean anything.”
Dan agreed. “But what should we say?” he wondered. “The best wine?”
Suddenly, it was all clear to me. We have become grounded on the shoals of vagueness. “That’s better, but it’s not good enough. We have to be more specific. What do you mean, ‘the best wine’? Why is it the best? The best for what? The best wine you’ve ever tasted in your entire life? The one wine that Robert Parker will finally rate with one hundred points? The best wine on this restaurant’s wine list—and how would you know that? Or maybe just the best wine for this particular dinner?”
“Stop!”
But I couldn’t stop. “The problem is that ‘best’ is entirely the wrong We have to rediscover the wonderful world of picturesque description. We’d be better off with just ‘This wine is really good.’ But even so, we can do much better. We have to start learning all over again how to say what we really mean. And what we really mean here is, ‘This wine is delicious.’ Or, ‘It’s exactly the kind of wine I was hoping for.’ Or even, ‘I really like this wine; it’s just to my taste.’”
And so we vowed we would try, from that moment on, to avoid certain formerly funny phrases and instead to say specifically what we mean. It’s hard, but we are doing our best to keep each other honest. We may need to join a twelve-step program.
On our last night in Barcelona, we explored a restaurant that sounded promising on Yelp and was only a short walk from our hotel. After we’d been seated, looked over the menu and ordered, and our first course had arrived, Dan said, “This restaurant is the best.”
I gave him a squinty, head=tilted look.
“Restaurant. It’s the best restaurant.”
“Really?” I asked. “In the world? According to whom?” (Yes, folks, I do actually, from time to time, use the word ‘whom’ in ordinary speech.) “The best in what respect? Certainly not the tablecloths.” (There were none.) “No other restaurant has better service? Better ambiance? Is it the variety of items on the menu? How perfectly they are cooked? Have you tried enough items on the menu to be sure? Or are you talking about value for the money? Maybe it’s just that the restaurant is the right length of a walk from our hotel?”
Dan sighed. “I really like the menu and the food, and it’s exactly the quality and degree of informality I was hoping for, on our last night in Barcelona. I can’t imagine a better place for us to be having dinner tonight.”
I sighed and smiled. “I feel the same way.”