Having just read Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves, I’ve added yet another word to my list that should very rarely (if ever) be uttered, typed, or written down: ‘stickler’. Ugh! Just say it aloud a few times. It’s horrible. It’s loaded with derogatory self-acceptance. It’s proud to demean itself. It takes pride in its shame for being what it is. People who are anal should either stop being anal or be proud of being anal and stop referring to themselves in derogatory terms. That’s not the full extent of the crime however. She doesn’t actually believe that being uptight is a bad thing. Lynne is trying to lower herself to our level by using such self-deprecating terms. She thinks her readers are morons who can’t see why she would get upset about punctuation, so she writes in a patronising, self-depreciating tone, dumbing down her writing for you and me. It’s a horrible read and about 100 pages too long. In what seems to be attempts at comedy, she talks about becoming a terrorist and what a unique and eccentric person she is, getting riled up about bad punctuation. I’m impatiently waiting for her follow up work,
In truth, however, I didn’t come here to talk about Lynne Truss. Adding a new word to my list only reminded me of the most heinous word I’ve ever added to my invisible notebook – divine. When talking about divinity it is, of course, perfectly permissible. ‘God is divine.’ may be obvious, but at least it’s correct. ‘This Vienetta is divine.’ is the moron’s way of trying to sound sophisticated and epicurean, and, as we shall see, a poor choice of words. And it’s never ‘divine’ is it? It’s always ‘diviiiiiiiiiine’. I know at this point some of you are getting uncomfortable and maybe even defensive, perhaps reassuring yourself that you don’t say it in an elongated way. In truth, we all have used the word this way, but I decided to wage war against it after an incident a couple of years ago, during my travels through the Orient, when I was on a long bus journey to a lotus festival in South Korea. It was difficult enough trying to sleep in my seat, but it wasn’t made any better by the loud South African men behind me. One of them was trying to charm a lady by offering her some type of confectionery. I didn’t see what it was or hear what she said, but I heard the whole exchange clearly, given the loud and clearly enunciated accent of the South Africans. One of the charmers professed the divinity of the sweet, elongating the second ‘i’ in a way that betrayed all decency. Furthering his profound and poetic insight, master of the charms waited for a natural calm in the chatter before claiming that it was like “a little bit of heaven in your mouth”. Seconds elapsed before chatter resumed, allowing for the magnitude of the thought to sink in. And so, a boring conversation ensued behind me, and I was forbidden from sleeping, their cacophonic voices stabbing me in the ear every time I approached sleepytown. Perhaps I could have enacted revenge upon then – a simple tongue excision would have sufficed – but I’ve heard that they’ve got… (You knew this was coming.) diplomatic immunity.
Let’s go through this then. ‘Divine’ primarily means godlike. Somebody decided one day to broaden its application, by comparing things to the divine. Using it this way makes use of extra vocabulary, and the person who first did this probably felt quite clever, but it doesn’t work. Food and drink (and we’re usually talking about that here) are very unlike the divine. Think of the connotations of the word divine: ethereal, eternal, immaterial, radiant, ineffable, spiritual. “Aha!” say you, “What about pantheists?” Pantheists might object on the ground that God is everywhere and everything, and ergo material. I refuse to register their arguments for two reasons. Firstly, if God is everything, effectively we are saying that God is nature. Why then multiply our entities beyond necessity? Why not just remove God, accept that nature has a unity and laws, and admit atheism? Secondly, I just cannot accept a group of people whose name sounds like a clever term for those who discriminate against transvestites.
The point I was making was that divinity is something abstract, something that we cannot sense. Food is quite the opposite; it’s material, tangible, and sensual. Now, I know what you’re thinking: as they are made from living things, food and drink are close to the divine. “On Aquinas’s Ladder of Being, living beings are a step closer to the divine than minerals etc.” you say. You follow it up by telling me that all organic material, endowed with an immaterial spirit, is divine when compared to dead matter which has absolutely no spirit or aspect of divinity. Lapsing into your smugness, you realise that not only is ‘divine’ accurate, but an insightful comparison between matter living and dead. Thomists and the saint himself would be impressed with your application, your vanity tells you. Well, my child, I’m afraid to tell you that you have merely presented an argument that will be deconstructed and dismissed, in the same fashion as Aquinas’s works. Firstly, the food we eat is generally dead. Perhaps you’re making reference to the bacteria and other micro organisms on the food, but I doubt it. We’re talking about dead matter, something lifeless, and we’re comparing it to the source of all life. Aside from being as inaccurate could possibly be, it’s also somewhat blasphemous. One might even argue that Christ’s body vanished from this world, such was God’s distaste for being a carcass. We could well imagine the God of Abraham being greatly angered at being compared to a dead lump of meat or some caramelised sugar.
Finally, ‘divine’ tells us nothing about the food. Is it salty or sweet? Spicy, creamy, sour, sugary, nutty, crispy, chewy, bitter, tangy, refreshing, luscious, rich, filling, or light? Please add your own adjectives; they don’t even have to be so specific. Try ‘tasty’ or ‘delicious’, ‘yummy’ or ‘amazing’. ‘Sensational’ is pretty much tautological, but it works well, as Richard Nixon knew, when he was lamenting the high standard of presidential food he had the privilege of eating. The man may have been a crook, but he had standards. I do, too. I can only think of one circumstance where ‘divine’ is permissible when describing food: when one is foregoing the use of ‘good’ (e.g., The chicken’s really gooooooood.). Don’t get me started on that one.
