This past weekend I escaped the polar vortex for a few days of vacation in warmer climes, and I found myself thinking a lot about the word perfect. It had nothing to do with the weather (which was lovely, but not perfect) or the hotel (also lovely, but is any hotel perfect?). It was the service. Not that the service was perfect. It just seemed that everything I ordered or said was perfect.
Server: “What can I get for you?”
Me: “I’ll take the salmon bento box.”
Server: “Perfect. And how would you like the salmon cooked?”
Me: “However the chef recommends it.”
Server: “Perfect.”
And:
Man at the front desk: “Are you checking out?”
Me: “Yes.”
Man at the front desk: “Would you like to confirm the charges and then do you want us to put it on the Visa on file?”
Me: “Yes.”
Man at the front desk: “Perfect.”
This weakened use of perfect as a conversational substitute for “great,” “sounds good,” “fine,” or “okay” has been on my radar for a few months. I’ve heard myself say it on multiple occasions, for example to confirm a meeting (e.g., “2 pm? Perfect.”) or to affirm a friend’s decision (e.g., “Let’s get tacos.” “Perfect.”).
Is 2 pm the perfect time for the meeting or are tacos the perfect dinner option? Unlikely. But I’m not actually saying they are. Perfect, in this context, has a new meaning. As a response in a conversational adjacency pair or group (e.g., request-approval, question-answer-validation), perfect has come to be an enthusiastic affirmation and/or a super-polite one. It is highly other-oriented, complimenting the other person’s decision, choice, or suggestion.
This conversational use of perfect as a polite response is likely related to the hyperbolic use of perfect in polite conversation (e.g., “I love this gift—it’s perfect!” or “Thank you for such a great evening. The meal was perfect.”). The most recent edition of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, in fact, includes as its eighth definition of perfect: “Excellent and delightful in all respects: a perfect day.”
There is no cause for alarm here: word meanings weaken on a regular basis. And words don’t necessarily have to lose their stronger meaning as a result (although they sometimes do, which is also just part of the process of language change). Consider the verb starve, which still means ‘die of hunger’ but also carries a weaker—and widely used and accepted—meaning of ‘be very hungry.’
The word unique provides a fairly similar case to perfect. Historically, unique has meant ‘one of a kind’ and it still often does, but in day-to-day usage it has also weakened for many speakers to mean something more like ‘highly unusual’ (which allows people to say that some things are “more unique” than other things or “very unique”—a linguistic pet peeve for some folks). Just as things that are not one of kind can now be unique, things that are not faultless can be perfect.
If you hadn’t noticed the spread of “perfect!” before, I would guess you will now hear it all around you, perhaps even in your own speech. One of the dangers of putting these things on our collective linguistic radar is that once we start noticing them, we can start to feel vexed. And there is no question that the overuse of any word, be it like or right or lovely or perfect, can draw attention to the word itself in ways that can be distracting. But I hope you can find the weakening of perfect more interesting than worrisome—a perfect example, so to speak, of how a word can get repurposed to become a meaningful interactional gesture.
