Can we please stop elevating and curating everything?
Hotels have elevated bar bites, bed butlers and pillow menus while airlines announce curated content collaborations. What on earth does this all mean?
A recent column on daft words and expressions flooding the travel universe saw my mailbag floweth over, as we might have said back in the days of proper penmanship and stationery and, let’s face it, a reasonable interest in grammar and usage.
One reader readily pointed out that while waffling away, I had missed a great opportunity to mention a curate’s egg. And, to be fair, in my rush to rant and rave about elevating and curating, I had clean forgotten to take “a deep dive” into even murkier territory. Yikes.
But having donned my rather frayed and perished year 12 bathing cap and prepared for a reverse somersault in the pike position, I am primed to plunge into yet more liberties with the English language. While you (and I) have been sleeping, a luxury Asian accommodation group has “elevated its luxury proposition”. I have no idea what that infers, and I suspect nor does whoever made up such meaningless puff. And an international luggage brand has just redesigned a suitcase as “an icon reimagined”; better not tell any biblical scholars of your acquaintance.
A wellness spa, meantime, has engaged the services of a specialist in not only Chinese medicine principles but “energetic and emotional regulation and validation” and “talk therapy”. I am a very chatty person and think I would do well charging an hourly rate just to talk to, or rather at, people; I reckon I’d end up being paid a lot by clients to just shut up.
A leading Sydney hotel has revamped its popular bar and like every other drinking hole on the planet is “meticulously curating” cocktails and has a “food menu” (as opposed to a “pillow menu”, because they’re upstairs in the hands of the bed butlers) of “elevated bar bites”. In my experience, such snacks (or “savouries” in the old days) are perilously tiny and I therefore worry about their safety as they reimagine their worth and perform levitation tricks amid all those fancy foams and “flamed” offerings.
Imagine being a harmless little retro devil on horseback or a miniature blini saddled with slippery plops of caviar and sour cream? There you are, elevating politely and suddenly you’ve either drowned as an afterthought in a foamed-up margarita or been caught in the slipstream of a bartender with a cigarette lighter intent on some pyrotechnics with, say, that fiery old classic Blue Blazer. A what? It’s a sort of hot toddy with attitude and, to be fair, could be referred to as “carelessly curated”.
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