Crafting Superlatives

A man came up to the reference desk today to complain that a page had been cut out of Cat Fancy magazine. Trying to conceal my surprise that anyone actually reads Cat Fancy, I told him I was sorry for the inconvenience. He asked, "Well what are you going to do about it?" I in turn asked, "Well what was the page that was cut out?" He said, "I don't know, it's been cut out, so I have no way of knowing."

I started over: "What I meant was that if it was a page of an article you were reading, we could trying finding the full text of the article on-line." He said, "No, I think it was just pictures." He left the magazine with me and stomped off. I just kept thinking, There are people who actually read Cat Fancy magazine. And there are people who want parts of it so badly they are willing to cut out pages. And there are people who want me to miraculously recover missing pages of Cat Fancy even though they have no idea what was on them.

Mind you, I like cats. I have known many cat owners throughout my life. But to my knowledge not a single one of them has read a word of Cat Fancy. My family never had fewer than two dogs growing up. We didn't subscribe to Dog Fancy, Mutt Monthly or This Old Dog.

But back to the mutilated copy of Cat Fancy. I glanced at the cover. In the upper-right corner was printed, "THE WORLD'S MOST WIDELY READ CAT MAGAZINE." Then I just thought, How many cat magazines can there be? "Most widely read cat magazine" isn't that big a deal. That's like saying, "Highest-circulation hamster journal."

If you add enough qualifiers you can say anything and it will be true. For example. Ben & Jerry's claim to be the makers of "Vermont's Finest All-Natural Ice Cream" never impressed me as much as it did some people. I simply took it to mean that there was better ice cream in Vermont, it just had a chemical additive or two. I also concluded from the claim that there was all-natural ice cream that is better than Ben & Jerry's, you just couldn't get it in Vermont.

I can't remember where or when I read this, I think it may have been while I was working at one of my miserable mid-nineties editing jobs that I stumbled across the sentence "Feral swine are the most abundant free-ranging exotic ungulate in the United States." Of course, then I felt I had to find out what exotic ungulate there was in the U.S. that was more abundant than feral swine that was not free-ranging.

Sadly, I never did.

Now that I've shown you the trick to making truthful superlative assertions, I must warn you that it's not a good idea to try this outside of advertising or academic writing. In the late nineties a female friend of mine began a relationship (conducted mostly via email) with an Australian guy that she thought was going somewhere. They met for a vacation in France where she floated the idea of moving to Australia. He freaked. Realizing that he wasn't serious about the relationship, she freaked. Trying to let her down easy, he said, "Look, you're wonderful. You're the most beautiful, witty, charming American email correspondent I've ever had."

Way to let a girl down easy, guy.

I wish I were making this up.