Come restaurant with me

A mastery of parallel constructions is one of the skills that separates the careful writer from the slapdash. Our world is rife with false parallelisms: “As a teacher, I will need to possess patience, warmth, respect, and be a good listener.” Ugh.

Airports are pretty reliable places to observe bad writing. I had to spend about 83 minutes of my life in one the other day, and, sure enough, I saw a false parallelism that made my skin crawl for a good five minutes or so. It was part of the slogan (if you can call it that) of the restaurant near my gate. Here it is:

Now let’s take a look at those words beneath the restaurant’s name and try to insert them into some kind of grammatically parallel structure. It won’t work, but what’s interesting about this false parallelism is that it is palindromic in its falseness. That is, the elements are parallel in both directions, excluding the final element. Observe:

“Come to Scotty Browns. It is a restaurant. It is a lounge. It is a socialize." 

“Come to Scotty Browns. You can socialize. You can lounge. You can restaurant.”

With the middle element being equally plausible as a noun and a verb, we can’t be quite  sure which element actually makes the parallelism false. Maybe lounge is meant as a verb, in which case the noun restaurant is the false element. If lounge is a noun, then socialize is the offender. 

I found this rather confounding as I sat staring at the sign with nothing else to occupy my thoughts. (I was by myself, of course. Maybe I should have gone to Scotty Browns and enjoyed the socialize they have there.) I began to wonder if I wasn’t just observing the bleeding edge of language change; maybe restaurant is expanding to become not only a noun but also a verb. It’s happened before with contact and access, so why not with restaurant?

Maybe in the year 2013 we’ll say to our friends, “Hey, if you’re not busy Friday, why don’t we restaurant?” Our social communication could be revolutionized. Here are some other possibilities:

“I’m pretty broke, so I can’t restaurant much for a while.”

“I love New York; the restauranting is divine!”

“So this totally creepy guy tried to restaurant me the other night, and I had to lie that I had plans with my sister just to get him to leave me alone.”

If it’s the case that in ten years we’ll all go “restauranting” without giving the term a second thought, then I guess I have to commend the proprietors of Scotty Browns for bringing linguistic innovation right into the mainstream. They’ve shown the masses how to be flexible and creative with words. Usually this is the kind of thing that only poets do.