Hate It: "Let's Do Lunch!"

In the early 90s, this phrase was almost entirely confined to the set of “Melrose Place” and to aerobics classes filled with expectant mothers wearing ASICS and sporting flimsy nylon gym bags.  It was eventually adopted by 50-year-old divorcée art gallery owners with raspy smoker’s voices who wear sunglasses inside and keep their dogs inside their stores.  You know the type of person I’m talking about?  Take your average HAA concentrator, minus the subtle pedantic braggadocio and flowing scarf, and add about 30-40 years. There. Now we’re on the same page.

In 1999, however, something interesting happened. Bill Clinton was finishing his last year as President. The Dow was up (and many predicted that it would keep rising). Other normal things were probably happening all around the world and at Harvard. It was in these times that the phrase made its way to Harvard by way of the most unsuspecting of mules: candidates for the UC, members of Theta, and HAA concentrators who needed to maintain friendship networks to populate the art shows they would eventually host in places like Santa Fe, Seattle, and any other up-and-coming metropolitan area featured in The New York Times travel magazine.

This subtle syntactic shift made it seem like “lunch” was an entity of its own rather than just a means by which humans interact and eat food. Accordingly, there are only certain places where it is appropriate that lunch should be “done”: seemingly modish but actually dull places like Grafton or Daedalus, both darlings of Harvard students on business lunches promoting their social entrepreneurship Web sites or catching up with their roommate back from a semester abroad in Buenos Aires or Shanghai.

Please. Lunch isn’t something that must be “done,” as though it’s an event all on its own rather than a means by which friends eat together. See you at Trata.