Wordwatch: Enjoy

In everyday English the verb “to enjoy” requires an object: we always enjoy something specified, like fine weather, good food or good company. If we are asked to “enjoy” we expect to be told what it is that we are to derive pleasure from.

But the imperative (or command) “[please] enjoy”, used transitively but with no stated object, as when the waiter gives us a plateful and asks us to “enjoy”, has been fairly common in British English for some decades now. It’s not a traditional use of the word, and seems to carry overtones of an instruction, or an order.

It seems to have come over, as usual, from America, and I think of it as a translation of the German — or perhaps Yiddish — “schmeckt”, which means “it tastes good”, from the verb “schmecken”, “to taste” or “to taste good”, and is often used both imperatively and interrogatively by waiters (or dinner hosts) in German-speaking countries: “Does it taste good?”  It’s sometimes used pleonastically, or tautologically, with a separate word meaning “good”: “schmeckt gut” — which also means simply “it tastes good”.

We in Britain have never been very good at invitations to take pleasure in the business of eating, and that seems to says something quite important about our attitude to food (though I refuse to believe either that we fail to appreciate good cooking, or that our national cuisine lacks good cooking in the first place).

The French famously say “bon appétit”, the Italians likewise “buon appetito”, and the Germans have their own version of the phrase: “guten appetite”. There really was a gap in our usage, which “enjoy”, in this American-imported sense, now fills, despite its apparently very un-British use of the verb.

But maybe it’s not as new or as foreign as it seems. In a poem written three hundred years ago, the word used in this sense crops up unexpectedly in a very august context: Homer’s epic of the war between the Greeks and the Trojans, the Iliad, as translated by one of the great poets of the early eighteenth century, Alexander Pope.

His version is couched in rhyming iambic pentameters, a somewhat inflexible form for such a free-flowing poem. In book XXIV of Pope’s version, Homer recounts how the Trojan king Priam visits the Greek hero Achilles in his tent to beg for the return of the body of his beloved son, Hector, whom Achilles has killed. Achilles asks Priam to stipulate what he wants from him. Priam replies:

‘Nine days to vent our sorrows I request,

The tenth shall see the funeral and the feast…’

‘Tis thy request’ (replied the chief,): ‘enjoy:

Till then our arms suspend the fall of Troy’

                                           (lines 834-8).

Here, Achilles uses the imperative “enjoy” in exactly the same sense that your waiter uses it when he asks (commands?) you to relish your meal. But whereas the waiter is merely repeating a formula, the equivalent of “bon appetit”, we can take it that Achilles means all that the word can really mean. It isn’t stripped of its sense by convention and overuse.