Hand crafted words lovingly enrobed in punctuation

I got an instant message at work today from my friend Mikey. This usually happens several times a day and is one of the things that makes coming into work bearable. If nothing else it's a break from gazing at mindnumbing spreadsheets or sending someone a mail chasing them for not having responded to your mail chasing them for etc. etc.

“I’m so fed up of food descriptions” he said. “Ha! Ha! has sent me an email. ‘Hand crumbed haddock fingers’ indeed.”

This prompted a lengthy rant on the fun bus home about, among other things, how in God's name you would crumb haddock except by hand. And he’s right – it’s almost clichéd now to complain about this sort of thing. Nothing is “fried” when it can be “pan fried”. As if you were going to fry it in a shoe box, on a bin lid or atop a life size cut out of J from 5ive. Nothing is baked when it can be “oven baked”. And that’s before we get to descriptions. “enrobed” is a favourite of mine. Why use wrapped when you can use enrobed? Of course it sounds more sumptuous – it just happens to be utter bobbins. "Look at my packed lunch, it's enrobed in hand torn clingfilm" isn't something I recall anyone saying when we head for the canteen every day at lunchtime.

Such bland observational humour aside, Mikey and I were musing about where it will all end. “tin opened chicken soup” is surely only a few years away from winding up on pub menus throughout the land. “cheddar croustades with a Branston couli” is another personal favourite of mine. And I can’t wait to see “taken out of the foil tray by family artisans who have been heating up ready meals for generations”.

I remember at college when the catering staff went through an attempt to make our menu more sophisticated. The menu, I hasten to add, rather than the food – after all, that just involved dicking around on a word processor rather than going anywhere near a food processor. “Chips” were the first thing to go – replaced with the preposterous “chipped potatoes”. And if that gives the impression that they were faulty in some way it wasn’t entirely inaccurate. I assume they didn’t mean they had electronically tagged our dinner, though some of it was so dangerous that it might have merited a try. But even I was impressed when they announced that guinea fowl would be on the menu. That was something else.

I turned up early that evening to avoid disappointment – which, looking back, is laden with irony. There, in the stainless steel serving dish, were a bunch of mangy looking, veiny chicken legs. The same chicken legs, in fact, that they served up every week. Some of them looked like they could well have been the same chicken legs that they served up the week before. They needed a shave more than I did. I looked the woman behind the counter in the eye.

”This isn’t guinea fowl, is it”? I asked.

“No, it’s chicken. Don’t forget your chipped potatoes.”

On the subject of rebranding someone brought a box of Milk Tray into work quite a while back and I was impressed to see that they had renamed all the chocolates, seemingly with the sole intention of making them sound as smutty as possible. It’s almost as if someone was specifically marketing chocolates just for me and my ilk (i.e. the puerile). “Praline Whisper”, “Fudge Surprise”, “Nut Caress”… all present and correct. If only it had contained something like a “Ganache Felch” my life would have been truly complete.