I tend towards the pedantic, and am (very mildly) put off by terms that I consider inaccurate and misleading. This morning, I realized I did not know exactly what was meant by a hand scraped wood floor. Google reveals that the majority of such floors are actually scraped by machine. And I really do not think anyone lives in the restaurant kitchens where they make homemade soups, or that the soups are shipped in from someone’s private household kitchen.
Anyone else find such terms a little off? Do you have any other similar examples? And exactly what types of tools can be used for something to be described as “handmade”? (Well, a human finger DID push the button on the CNC/digital printing machine!)
There is probably a term for that kind of advertising inaccuracy, because anyone who spends a nano-second thinking about it would know they aren’t literally true.
“Hand-scraped wood” floor components would not come to you in a cardboard carton. I assume what they are going for is “looks like hand-scraped,” which may or may not be true. Hard for me to judge, since I have never seen any wood that was hand-scraped, except the mantel that I made for my house, which is exceptionally smooth due to my using a card scraper. I assume they mean rustic, as if it were made for a log cabin by splitting the wood and then scraping it mostly flat with a spokeshave or something like that.
For most items with these kinds of descriptions, I don’t care if it’s literally true (even though I count myself also as somewhat pedantic). I just care if it serves the purpose, or tastes good, or whatever measure of quality is appropriate. And, for food, I also care what the ingredients and nutritional values are. My mother used to work in the office of a company called Grandma’s Cookies. I didn’t suppose the cookies were made by anyone’s grandma, I only cared how many of them I could stuff into my face.
Funny, I’ve never seen that usage. Reminds me of corporate law. Many corporations have their own lawyers, which are “in-house counsel.” On occasion they will hire a law firm to represent them. Instead of outside counsel, I prefer to be consistent and call them “outgouse counsel.”
What are the limits to puffery? I usually thought of puffery in the realm of “World’s best!” “Homemade” and “hand-scraped” don’t seem as much exaggerations as inaccurate statements. I’ve bought hardwood flooring more than once over the past decades, and always thought the term “hand-scraped” curious, but always thought it meant some person was manually doing the scraping. At what point should one say, “homemade” as opposed to “homestyle”, or “in the style of handscraped”? At the very least, oughtn’t there be fine print?
And handmade is curious. Did the maker only use non-powered tools? Or did the hands simply operate the most sophisticated mechanical devices?
I’ll ask my wife - the one who teaches business law - for her take…
Little mom-and-pop restaurants that put “homemade” on their menu likely get away with it, for a couple of reasons:
(a) There isn’t any authority which polices such things, unless someone complains (and that would likely, at best, lead to a civil lawsuit, and maybe the restaurant being required to change their menu.
If a larger chain used the term, especially if they used it in advertising, then the FTC might get interested, and start asking for substantiation of the claim.
(b) Dictionary definitions of “homemade” don’t strictly define the term as only “being made in someone’s home.” And, in fact, “we make it here, ourselves, at the restaurant” is a cromulent use of the term, according to the definitions:
This drives me crazy. At Starbucks, they sell something called a “loaf,” but it’s not a loaf, it’s a slice of cake baked in a loaf pan. I guess they don’t want to say “cake” or “slice,” and “loaf” sounds nice and homey, but if I buy a loaf, I want the whole loaf, dammit.
But yes, “homemade” is the one that gets to me most.
I assume you’re talking about "banana loaf or something similar - that doesn’t bother me, it’s short for a “slice of banana loaf cake” just like “cheesecake” or “pound cake” or “apple pie” on a restaurant dessert menu doesn’t mean I’m getting the entire cake/pie.
“House-made” gets to me more. If you don’t want to call it home made because a restaurant is not a home, well it’s not a house, either.
There’s a scraping tool for wood. Very labor intensive. I heard Norm Abrams describe it as reducing the grain depth for smoother applications of finishes. Some woodworker can come say more.
We have a hamburger joint that claims ‘hand formed’ patties. For some reason I don’t like that.
Fat Daddy’s hot water cornbread adds “you can see Grandma’s fingerprints on them” on their package.
In house-made would be better. IMO.
House is used in restaurants all the time.
Front of house is waitstaff and hosts.
Back of house, would be the kitchen.
How good is a bare human hand at scraping a floor? Any sense of ‘hand-scraped’ includes some device or tool, unless they’re scraping it with their fingernails, so ‘hand-scraped’ is semantically incorrect right out of the gate, if you care about semantics.
Well, handsewn doesn’t mean you used your fingers as a needle and thread. It means it was done with your hands with a tool. Most hand crafts use a tool or three.
