February 7: Time for a New Suit -

Because I’m auditing a class at PSU, I get to use the wonderful pool in the gym. I showed up for a deep water exercise class one morning, and saw another swimmer struggling with something unseen, below the surface. “Wardrobe malfunction,” she said. I nodded.

“I’ve had this suit for years,” she said.

I gave her my “been there” smile. “Strange how stuff sometimes disintegrates, isn’t it?” I said.

She was annoyed. “The fabric is perfectly good,” she said, “but the stitching is coming apart.”

That got me thinking about “perfectly good,” and now I’m noticing it everywhere.

“Perfectly good” isn’t like “perfectly balanced,” or “perfectly seasoned,” which are straightforward positives. Something “perfectly good” is generally … not. You wouldn’t say something was perfectly good unless its perfect goodness was at least in question. There’s something defensive about it, or argumentative, or, at a minimum, frustrated.

My pool pal was using “perfectly good” in its “don’t be wasteful” and “frustrated” sense, which is a song of my people. The suit was perfectly good, still, fabric-wise. It was only the damn STITCHING that had failed.

“Perfectly good” has a lot of range. In its benign form, it’s for small and debatable problems: the yogurt only one day past its (stupid, arbitrary) pull date, the paper towel that mopped up a few drops of water. Perfectly good yogurt, perfectly good paper towel. Don’t be a fussbudget.

But small and debatable flaws are in the eye of the beholder. One person’s perfectly good is another’s unsavory: the perfectly good lollipop (now that all the dog hair and dirt have been rinsed off) (cue sobbing toddler). The perfectly good leftovers (now that all the mold has been scraped off). The perfectly good sponge that smells fine to you, but smells like fish tank sludge to me. And that’s before we use it on people.  “He’s a perfectly good dentist!” Why? What’s wrong with him?

I went to Google Scholar to see if I could find a Linguistics paper on “perfectly good,” and it didn’t show up in the first zillion hits. Most of the papers were in either Philosophy or Theology, and struck me as boring. But boring was better than the vaguely ominous ones (Engineering papers, for instance, on “perfectly good” bridges).

Then I went off to the Corpus of Contemporary American English (more than one billion words!), and searched to see which nouns most often follow “perfectly good.”  Top three: REASON, REASONS, and EXPLANATION. I think these go with my sense that “perfectly good” is often used defensively.  Further down the list were items that were more poignant, or more puzzling:  JOB, MARRIAGE, CAKE, OMELET,  GUMDROP (cue sobbing toddler?), SASHIMI (cue food poisoning?), PRESBYTERIAN, VIRGIN. 

Your guess is as good as mine.

At the next deep water exercise class, my pool mate got there before me, and surrounded herself with a ring of floating dumbbells and pool noodles and whatnot. I asked, “How’s the wardrobe malfunction?” and she said, “Got a new suit. Sixteen dollars. On sale.” I couldn’t see it, but I bet it’s a perfectly good suit.