I’m pretty tired of “curated”.
“The house” is a perfectly acceptable synonym for a business. You play “against the house” at the blackjack table. A beer given to you for free by your hostess is “on the house”. In a restaurant, the waitstaff are “front of house” and the kitchen staff are “back of house”.
No, I don’t mean that. I mean pedantry is a rod for your own back.
Meh, advertising puffery only bothers me when it extends into outright deception, which your (the OP’s) two examples IMHO do not. I’ve never seen the term “hand-scraped floors”, but as we live in an era of manufactured pre-finished wood flooring as well as manufactured fake wood flooring, to me it simply conveys the impression that it was sanded and finished in place after installation, and thus that there was some expertise involved in the process of doing a customized job. I certainly don’t get the impression that the floor was sanded by someone on their hands and knees using a tiny piece of sandpaper wrapped around a toothbrush.
“Home made” has become such a euphemism for “we make our own, we don’t buy it ready-made from a mass market source” that it doesn’t bother me much, either, although I’d prefer a more straightforward statement like “we make our own” or “made in-house”.
As I implied above, to me any kind of tool is acceptable, as long as it’s used by a craftsman to perform one specific task, as opposed to being used to facilitate mass production. I tend to consider the terms “hand made” and “custom made” to be roughly equivalent. For instance, if you commissioned a cabinetmaker to make a set of bookcases for you to precise measurements to exactly fit your room, with the exact wood and finish that you specified, would you care what fancy power tools he used to build it? I would care only to the extent that I would hope he had all the best tools needed for the job. I mean, which would you prefer for your bookcases: “hand made with a hand saw” or “precision cut with a table saw”?
I don’t have a problem with “house” as a synonym for the business. It’s specifically the phrase “house-made” as a replacement for “home made” that annoys me.
Curious that in this case the term hand scraped is both inaccurate in that it does not describe a process done “by hand”, but it also conveyed an inaccurate impression to you. The scraping is done to the boards before installation, to give them a unique, uneven, “wavy” appearance. I had assumed the individual boards were scraped “by hand” during the manuacturing stage, but my understanding is that nowadays the majority of them are actually scraped by mchine. Some folk complain that the machine process gives the boards a uniform - and thus artificial/machine-made - appearance.
In addition to “puffery”, I wonder if some such terms might have specific meanings within their industry. For example, “hand-scraped” may be understood to refer to the resulting appearance rather than the process.
My wife makes violins. Most makers reproduce violins made 100s of years ago by the likes of Strad, Guarneri, … There is the constant discussion of whether one ought to use solely non-powered hand tools - at least at certain steps in the process, as opposed to the Chinese built instruments fashioned largely on CNCs. I often come down on the side that says I bet Stradivari was using the most advanced tools available to him at the time, and I suspect he would be doing the same today.
yep FORK “curated” and its crippled alcoholic spawn “bespoke”
(swings fist at “carefully selected”) - NO - the tomatoes for your bloody ketchup were not carefully selected, they came by the truckload along with a couple of hundred insects and spiders - that are now mashed-up in your ketchup
And bird shit. Don’t forget the bird shit.
It gives the resulting mix that certain ineffable je ne sais quoi that marks a fine artisanal bespoke condiment carefully curated for our convenience.
Speaking of which: If we’re gonna rant …
I pit (in an IMHO-compatible fashion) the common corpspeak that they’re doing “[whatever] for your convenience.” Like heck you are. Whatever you’re doing, it’s for your convenience and is nothing but an annoyance to me. Quit lying and more than that, quite telling me just how stupid you think I am to fall for your blatant BS.
Along with this I still see many restaurants where I live adding a 3% surcharge for COVID related expenses. Were they not cleaning things before COVID and only now incur an expense to be clean?
Not to mention, the COVID ship has sailed. Their restaurants are packed as much as they were before COVID but the surcharge remains.
Same with hotels. They piously tell you they are not cleaning your room everyday to avoid the spread of COVID and save the environment. Ok…but did they reduce charges when they decreased service? Nope. This is not for my benefit. It is for their benefit.
Ironic, since I suspect there’s a non-zero chance that restaurants coined “house-made” specifically because pedantic customers kept asking them, “so, at whose home was this pie actually made?”
The first place I encountered “House Made” was at a place where it truly fit, House of 1000 Beers, restaurant and taphouse.
Especially when identified in an additional “convenience charge.” No, I DON’T find it convenient to fight through your #*@^$% website instead of calling a human or picking it up at the store/theater…
And doubly especially when there’s no way whatsoever to avoid the “convenience charge”; it’s just a part of the regular price that’s hidden away so it looks cheaper.
My fave was several years back when I was buying theater tickets. I worked downtown, so to avoid the Ticketron service fee, I walked to the box office over lunch. Guess what?
I kind of look at it as a more accurate version of the exact same thing. “Home made” kind of implies made at someone’s home, or using someone’s family recipe, from scratch. “House-made” is something else- it may be a recipe devised by the head chef, and made from scratch from by the sous-chefs, but it doesn’t come with the same implications and connotations that “home made” does.
That thought was in my mind while reading the thread- I’d much rather have the guy with the meticulously aligned and maintained table saw with the laser guide than some guy with a hand saw, provided their level of skill was comparable. Hell, I’d rather have a CNC mill of some kind cut the dovetails for a set of drawers than some guy with a hand-operated router. Those CNC-milled dovetails are going to be exact on the first try, while the other guy’s may need some hand-fitting.
I guess the real question comes in as to what counts as “hand” made? I mean, someone’s got to set up the work pieces, program the machine, and so forth, even if it does the actual cutting. Which isn’t all that far off from merely setting up some sort of jig and moving the router yourself when it comes right down to it. There’s just more margin of error.
Sometimes I feel like that margin of error and the artisan’s compensation for it is what some people want to pay for; as if somehow it’s “better” to get a just-so dovetailed cabinet made by some blind Japanese monk who uses a 1000 year old saw, versus a virtually identical one made by some guy in a factory with a CNC mill.
I think part of the complaint over the terms is using a bit of advertising puffery to justify a higher base cost. If a loaf of bread labeled “artisanal” or “rustic” is $4.99, and the norm is $2.99, but there’s little/no perceptible difference, then, well, we’re pissed off.
(NOT a random example)
In the specific above, the only perceptible difference was price, and the “normal” loaf wasn’t sliced. Which granted, is a preference of mine in most (not all) cases, but it didn’t justify the price jump.
Same as @bump’s carpentry. If the laser cut, CNC milled piece of furniture is $299, but someone then adds “Old-World styled” (yet ANOTHER piece of shitty puffery) and marks it up to $499 for the same damn thing but with a more “authentic” (yet another!) wood color and varnish… screw that.
Or another example of furniture grift, selling something as “unfinished” so you can customize it as a pro, rather than admitting they can cut costs further by not bothering.
And what’s the deal with…
ohhh … one thing (while ranting) … in advertising that is IMHO deeply 'murican (and grates me to no end for its bigotery):
Serving our community since 19xx …
get the fork outta here you lying basterd … you are making profits from this community since 19xx …
if you were serving, you’d be giving your product away for free.
that - the SERVING Charade - I haven’t heard in other countries at all or not nearly as blatantly as in the great USofA … (I gladly hear other opinions, tho…)
This probably doesn’t quite fit, but since I mentioned them earlier in the context of scraped floors, what is the big deal about Amish woodworking such that it warrants a premium price?
I mean, sure, some Amish folk might be superior craftsmen. And if you want something created without power tools, that’s fine. But I’d wager the Amish community enjoys crappy craftsmen, the same as any other demographic.
For that matter, what level of regulation verifies that a piece of furniture was actually made by an Amish person, as opposed to simply being “in the Amish style”? 