A Perfect Episode

Introduction to Scotland

0:00Expedia and Visit Scotland invite you to come step into centuries of history that await in Scotland. Castles steeped in legend walk along cobblestone streets. Come share the warmth of stories passed down through generations. This is a place with a past that is fully present today and all yours to explore. Plan your Scottish escape today at Expedia.com slash VisitScotland.

Lexicon Valley Podcast

0:30From Washington, D.C., this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm Bob Garfield with Mike Volo, and we are delighted to report that this will be a perfect episode. Guaranteed. Pinky swear. Hey, Mikey. Hey, Bobby. How you doing? Splendid. Thank you. And your own self? I'm great. I'm great. I'm going to jump right in here with a question. Mm-hmm.

Customer Service Experience

1:00Have you ever had an experience on the telephone with a customer service representative that is particularly memorable? I would say that they're all varying degrees of frustrating, but nothing stands out. Okay. Well, as you know, these customer service reps all got their training at Abu Ghraib. I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They start with a battery of questions to confirm your identity so they can pass you along to someone else asking the same questions.

1:34And then, having ascertained that you are who you say you are, they commence torturing you. Mm-hmm. Yes. You know, I do remember now that someone from Verizon came to my house once and waterboarded me. Uh-huh. Okay. You're making fun of me, but I'm going to tell you, son, I've been there. Seven years ago or so, I was attempting to get a prescription refilled. And after three transfers, I was finally connected with a human being who asked me to confirm either my home address or, you know, the last four chromosomes of my genome sequence.

2:12Okay. And then? Then, when I provided the information, the agent responded with, perfect. Wow. You know, I don't even know my blood type, so that's impressive. You got your genome sequence apparently memorized, so I guess you aced the test. I aced the test over many decades. I've heard all kinds of expressions of customer service confirmation, including okay or great in the UK, as you've observed in a previous episode, brilliant, and a simple thank you.

2:48But this was the first time my answer achieved perfection. It was bound to happen eventually, right? The amount of time that you spend on the phone with these customer service reps, so congratulations. Months later, after this episode, going through the same process with the same pharmacy, I got exactly the same validation. Perfect. And ever since, that response has been creeping into the, shall we say, formulary of customer service speak.

3:22Just this week, in fact, one, two, three days ago, from the inner hell of an automated call direction queue, I was told, perfect, by a robot. Perfect. No, no, no, no.

3:40No, they don't talk like a 1960s sci-fi movie. They talk more or less like a live person, but yeah, the computer said, perfect. And now you want to know how we arrived at this level of perfection. I do. And then, of course, after you've explained that, I would like you to make it go away. Okay, well, no promises, but let's start with an altogether different form of torture.

Origin of Perfect

4:10Far worse, I would argue, than any customer service phone call, and that's middle school. Exactly. Just the sound of those words makes people shudder. So, the first time that you get a sense that there's something dodgy going on with the word perfect is in maybe 7th or 8th grade when you're learning about grammar, right? This word perfect keeps popping up in a way that's different from how you typically use it, and you're not really sure what's going on.

4:42Like, present perfect, past perfect, you're like, what? What does that mean? Plu-perfect. Yeah, why is that word even there? By the time you get to middle school, speaking is second nature. You're not thinking about the various verb tenses. You just talk. So, I'm not going to dwell on grammar. All right. I appreciate that. That said, present perfect, I have eaten. Past perfect, I had eaten. Future perfect, I will have eaten.

5:14Plu-perfect, who the hell knows. What do all of those have in common? The eating has already happened, right? Either before this very moment, the present, or before something else happened in the past, or before something else will happen in the future. The eating is done. You got the check. She forgot to charge you for the soup. Should you say something? I don't know. It's a whole thing. But the point is, you already ate lunch. Okay. Okay.

5:44So, that's more or less what perfect actually means. The fact part comes from the Latin verb, F-A-C-E-R-E. That means to do, which is a pretty important verb in most languages, if you want to do stuff. The per part means through, right? Like in the word perforate, which means to puncture through, essentially. So, to perfect is to do something through to the end, to carry it out.

6:16That's how it's used in grammar to indicate an action that has been completed. It's done just like our discussion of grammar now. So, the French got perfect from Latin, and we got it from the French. They say parfait, because they're French. I'm sorry, Steve Martin says. This is a joke I heard 50 years ago, I think. Those French, they have a different word for everything. Exactly.

6:47And it's pronounced nothing like the way it looks on the page, almost in every case. So, English went through a bunch of different spellings and pronunciations, but we eventually settled on perfect. So, when the word first shows up in English in the 1300s, it has this religious connotation of being so virtuous, so moral, that you could think of it as spiritually complete, right?

7:18You never stray. It still has this idea of completeness embedded in it. In the book of Matthew, for example, Jesus famously says to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. God, he goes on, causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good. He sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. So, be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. In other words, be so flawless that you're like God, right?

7:50Which is... Yeah, I'm there. It's a high bar. Apparently, you've met it. I don't boast about it, but it's more or less apparent to everyone wherever I go. If somebody brings it up, you'll cop to it. Yeah, but with a humble brag. I'm honored to be perfect. So, similarly, Psalm 37 says to mark the perfect man, behold the upright, because the future of that man is peace. More modern versions of the Bible translate the word perfect in Psalm 37 as blameless or

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8:59Now, it's easy to imagine that if perfect meant flawless in a religious context, then it would come to mean a similar thing in a more general context as well, and that's exactly what happened. So, one of the first non-religious ways it was used is a way that we still use it today. It's to talk about perfect or not so perfect vision. So, back in the 1300s, in what I would call a very unscientific discussion of the sciences,

9:32it's written that the air helps our vision to work properly. Without it, quote, sight may not be perfect. Of course, without air, you'd have much bigger problems than just bad eyesight. I mean, for example, if you make a living at carnivals doing balloon animals, you'd be out of luck. Yeah. Or breathing. Or breathing, yeah. Yeah. So, around the same time, in a medical text, somebody writes that a rabid dog doesn't have perfect sight because he stumbles around at anything that he sees.

10:05That's true. Rabies does affect vision, but again, probably have bigger problems if you have rabies. Yeah, I'll stipulate as to that. You know, it used to be, Bob, long ago that we might call someone a perfect knight or a perfect squire. That later became a perfect gentleman. You see that there's this idea of a complete gentleman, somebody who is so thoughtful, so chivalrous, so whatever it means to be a gentleman, they are it and they're perfect.

10:38I don't know if you want to cop to anything here. No, this is one category I make no bold claims. You know what I'm saying? You know, I do my best, but I still have that annoying Y chromosome and it acts up now and then. Okay, likewise, probably with my next example. And these all go back to, you know, the 1400s, 1500s, and they are all still phrases, idioms in a sense that we use today because they just go so well with the word perfect.

11:09So here in the 1400s, somebody writes that there is no bodily form so perfect as a round body. And I think what he was getting at there is that because of gravity and surface tension, roundness tends to form in nature a lot, right? The planets, for example, bubbles, eyeballs, speaking of sight. Charlie Brown's head. Mm-hmm. Dom DeLuise comes to mind.

11:41Oh my God. That is such a ridiculously dated reference. Okay, clearly that statement that that guy made in the 1400s was not about people, but when I think of the phrase perfect body, I think of... I want to have control.

12:03I want a perfect body.

12:08I want a perfect soul. My body, while near perfect, because it is God's work, it is not classically perfect. Yeah. Okay, so if the temperature is in the mid-70s in the Bronx, say, with low humidity and blue skies, you'll probably hear one of the announcers of the Yankees, Michael Kay or Paul O'Neill or whoever it is when they have a day off,

12:39you'll probably hear them say that it's a perfect day for baseball. Gorgeous, gorgeous weather in New York City, perfect for baseball. Will Warren is on the mound, taking his warm-ups as we inch closer to first... Yeah, that's a term of art for favorable weather conditions during a ballgame, for sure. Yeah, in fact, it's been a term of art or linguistic trope, this idea of it being a perfect day, for at least a couple hundred years.

13:10It started sometime in the mid-1800s. I associate that phrase with this song by Lou Reed. I know what you're going to play, and I love this song. Oh, it's such a perfect day I'm glad I spent it with you Oh, such a perfect day You just keep me hanging on

13:42You just keep me hanging on You don't think of Lou Reed as a melody maker. You know, you think of his hard edges and his raw content. You don't generally associate him with making a song that is just so lovely. He is easily in my top three Jews of popular music. Okay, so this trope of it being a perfect day,

14:15that got extended to it being a perfect ending to a perfect day. There's a birthday party at the home of Farmer Gray It'll be the perfect ending of a perfect day We'll be singing the songs we love to sing without a single stop At the fireplace where we'll watch the chestnuts pop Also, from at least the mid-1800s, people were talking about something making perfect sense.

14:48It all makes perfect sense Expressed in dollars and cents Pounds, shillings, and pens Can't you see? It all makes perfect sense So, you can see that whether it's sight or sense or English, if it's perfect, it's presumably complete, right?

15:22It can't get better. 2020 vision is perfect sight. Total fluency is perfect Spanish. It is the ne plus ultra. It is the zenith. It is the acme of perfection. You're Spanish? No, the word perfect. In the mid-1500s, a guy named Thomas Wilson wrote a book called The Art of Rhetoric, Asking and answering the question,

15:53How do you get good at this thing we call rhetoric? What makes the lawyer so eloquent, he asks? Practice. What makes the preacher speak so well? Practice, practice, practice. And as we all know, practice makes competence.

16:14Yes. Okay, so you're getting a little bit ahead of me. This is a direct quote. In all faculties, diligent practice and earnest exercise are the only things that make men prove excellent. He used the word practice seven times in this one paragraph. Now, back then, it was common to print a phrase or a sentence in the margins that summarized whatever point you were making. And next to that paragraph that I just quoted from,

16:46he wrote, Practice maketh all things perfect. Hmm. He may very well have coined that saying. Some of us don't like that expression, Practice makes perfect. We prefer practice makes progress. Because perfect has embedded in its etymology, as we've seen, and its meaning, this suggestion of completion, this idea that you're done. That's usually aspirational. It's always aspirational in fitness.

17:18But some things are perfect, right? The Godfather is perhaps a perfect movie. On May 29th, 2010, you probably remember this, Bob. Roy Halladay of your team, the Philadelphia Phillies, threw 115 pitches and 11 strikeouts for what? A perfect game. Yes, a perfect game. One of only 20, I don't know, three, I think, in the whole history of Major League Baseball. And you mentioned the perfect geometric object,

17:50a sphere. Okay, let's get back then

Rise of Perfect in Language

17:53to your original question about the rise of perfect. For at least five years now, as far as I could gather, people have been noticing and, like you, lamenting this perfect phenomenon. It may have started overseas. A journalist by the name of Rosita Boland, who writes for the Irish Times in Dublin, and this is in 2021, she called perfect the, quote, hiss of the year,

18:24the two-syllable word that has somehow become the default response of pretty much everyone working in hospitality. Well, that sentence is perfect. Yeah, pretty much. So she noted that nowadays it's often enunciated, especially by younger people, with what she called a slow and long-drawn purr, and the second syllable is the one that's hit harder,

18:55she said, and quickly. So in other words, perfect. Perfect. And then she wrote, it's not the way I've ever pronounced perfect. Well, because it doesn't pronounce the vowels the way people speak. About a year after Rosita Boland wrote that column, an American journalist for The Daily Reporter in Michigan wrote a very similar complaint, saying that she was hearing it everywhere as well.

19:26And she said, quote, it's definitely not a word I would use to describe scheduling a hair appointment.

19:35So a few years ago, somebody complained on Reddit about the overuse of the word perfect on the grounds that we live in reality where, quote, nothing is, ever has been, or ever will be perfect, and perfection does not, never has, and never will exist. That's arguably pedantic because as somebody else pointed out in the replies, very few people have actually died laughing, right? Or arrived a second later

20:07when they said, I'll be there in a sec. In other words, perfect is just another example of hyperbole, so deal with it, right? But the consensus among all of these people seems to be that the rise of perfect is part of the natural evolution of language. Words become more or less popular in part because older words start to sound old. You know, I remember when no problem was the default response of everybody

20:38in hospitality, as Rosita Boland might say, and people were complaining and writing columns about that phrase. Now it's just part of the background, right? Mm-hmm. So here we are with perfect, or as Gen Z might say, perfect. Well, if it is eventually, and I'm sure it will be replaced by another word that tries to, you know, make the same point that an accommodation has been accomplished, I hope it is not perfect.

21:10I hope it is not brilliant. I hope it is not awesome. I'm rooting for the next generation upon learning that their hair appointment has been set to say, all right, whatever. Which is probably more in keeping with the internal dialogue of most people, right? Exactly. And the actual gravity of the situation. Well, until we get to that point, Bob, I propose that you think about this all a little bit differently. The next time a customer service

21:40representative says perfect or perfect on the phone, Bob, here's what your inner dialogue should be. The torture, or at least that portion of the torture, has been carried out through to the end. It has been completed. If it were a verb tense, it would be prison perfect or pain perfect, perhaps. Your sentence has been commuted and you are that much closer to hanging up the phone and being

22:11a free man. Which is certainly a state of grace and maybe, now that you put it that way, a kind of perfection. Lexicon Valley is produced by Livia Bloom Ingram. Whose name translates from the ancient Greek as the enemy of the good. I had to think about that for a sec. Please visit us at booksmartstudios.com to leave a comment or to become a premium subscriber. Premium subscribers

22:41get all of our episodes ad-free. And access to our special bonus episodes. All right, Mikey, we done here? We are done. Later, Gator.

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