Monday 18 December 2023
Don’t you adore chocolates?
A question for Christmas - do prosperous, comfortable and easy lives entail degraded language?
She drew a cardboard box from her pocket, and offered it to Anna. ‘Here, have one.’ They were chocolate creams.
‘Thanks,’ said Anna, taking one. ‘Aren’t they very expensive? I’ve never seen any like these before.’
‘Oh! Just ordinary. Four shillings a pound. Papa buys them for me: I simply dote on them. I love to eat them in bed, if I can’t sleep.’ Beatrice made these statements with her mouth full. ‘Don’t you adore chocolates?’ she added.
‘I don’t know,’ Anna lamely replied. ‘Yes, I like them.’ She only adored her sister, and perhaps God; and this was the first time she had tasted chocolate.
Arnold Bennett - Anna of the Five Towns (1902)
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8 comments:
There is a halfway house between poverty (no treats) and wealth (all the treats you want). It is (to quote my long dead grandmother) a 'delightful sufficiency' where just a few treats are appreciated all the more.
I suspect that the ready availability of 'treats' has diminished us.
Is it, I wonder, an exclusively female tendency to express liking in those terms? I’m struggling to think of a description of (straight) men using language in exactly this way, although I can think of plenty of examples where football hyperbole has degraded the language of conflict and achievement. You have also reminded me that ‘to die for’ is currently the favoured term of my Ma-in-law and her bridge-club friends for anything from a new scarf to a chocolate biscuit. (It’s interesting that they are all just too young to remember WWII, when the phrase would have had a very different impact.)
Re treats: not too long ago, I suggested that my GCSE class could use small treats (edible or otherwise) as motivation to revise and some of them were genuinely baffled by the concept: “But if I want something like that, I just go and get it”.
I'm reminded of the observation (possibly by Peter York?) that upper-class types tend to make a massive fuss about trivia ("Absolutely stunning, marvellous vol-au-vents"...."It rained all afternoon, which was completely and utterly catastrophic!...") but downplay serious things ("Your husband died? What a bloody bore!"..."So he broke his back, which is rather dreary...")
DJ - I agree, there are no treats left in that halfway house sense. We have treats such as a square of dark chocolate with afternoon coffee, which is better than gobbling down the entire bar, but slightly artificial.
Macheath - I hadn't thought about it as being skewed towards women, but I'm sure you are right. Maybe the male football hyperbole you mention is spilling over into other areas though. It is certainly there in environmental rhetoric and we saw another version during the pandemic.
Sam - and that seems to have been going on for a long time, particularly the stiff upper lip, never flustered by anything aspect. As Macheath points out, maybe the massive fuss aspect is skewed towards women.
Twenty five or so years ago on one of our narrowboat holidays, we were walking through a Saturday market in Bedworth when I heard an acerbic young mother say to her young son of about ten years, "life's all about treats for you isn't it".
Kind of stuck in my memory as significant.
Tammly - maybe that's a way to look at it, life for some adults still is all about treats, they never grew out of it and now they can afford it.
Whatever happened to the 'two sweets only' rule? This was always imposed on us when we were kids!
I still consider this now, when faced with the big box of Quality Street...
Scrobs - we stick to the two sweets only rule although we rarely eat them. With dark chocolate it's one square only.
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