The Gallery of Errors · Specimen 907
The Bistro Menu
Thesis of failureHyperbole applied uniformly until it cancels itself, "literally" deployed to mean its own opposite, and epithets stacked where evidence should be. Inflation economics, performed in prose: when everything is legendary, the currency is worthless.
Device index
Hover a card to trace its span in the passage; click to pin its dossier card.
Tropes
Overstatement — here with no remaining headroom.
The part standing for the whole — here, travelling without it.
A figure whose literal content was never inspected.
Schemes
Descriptive tags fixed to a noun.
Syntax
The word securing a claim to fact, used to decorate a claim of fancy.
Full dossier
1The Autopsy
Every device here is aimed at the same target — magnitude — and that is the tell. Real praise varies its instruments: a texture, a provenance, a comparison, a fact. Uniform superlatives are the signature of a writer who has not tasted the dish, or worse, has, and is compensating. The final claim compounds it: "the best thing you will ever eat" mortgages the customer's entire future against a side order. No sentence should promise more than its potatoes can deliver.
2The Repair
Underclaim and specify. "Fries: cut this morning, fried twice in beef fat, salted once. Ask for the aioli." Not one word of praise — and the reader trusts all of it, because the sentence gives facts and lets the eater supply the praise.