What Is A Barbecue?
“Words have meanings” is a hackneyed phrase oft deployed by those who would like the world to be simple and neat, and while they’re correct in believing that words have meanings the world in which those words exist is neither simple nor neat. Words are creations of man, and when we impose those meanings on a chaotic and blurred world of happenstance and shade, they don’t quite fit.
Thing is, we’re never going to agree on the exact way in which they don’t fit.
So a couple of weekends ago I was visiting my friend Warren and got to see his new solar-panel-powered electric barbecue. It’s a sensible, efficient, and environmentally friendly device, and I had an immediate and strong, emotional reaction that. This. Was. Not. A. Barbecue.
But why did I have this reaction?
The problem is that in order to understand what a barbecue is, we first have to understand what it isn’t. I asked people on my personal Facebook page for one sentence definitions of “a barbecue” that explained what distinguished a barbecue from a kitchen oven or hob, and got the following replies:
A barbecue is a charcoal, wood or gas outdoor grill.
Food cooked for a small group of people on an outdoor heat source.
An outdoor, open-flame, charcoal-fueled device for burning meat/mushroom kebabs.
Something I am not allowed to use due to repetitive incendiary incidents.
A place where men assert their authority 🤔😂
Yeah, that’s interesting, but not at all a consensus.
But I think in seeking an answer to the question of what is a barbecue, we need to dig further, into the related question of why we have barbecues? After all, why not just cook the food in your kitchen? Yeah, sure it’s a nice day, but there’s nothing to stop you having a party in your garden and eating your food out there.
To me, a barbecue feels like an event. And that event involves me (a man), a bag of charcoal, fire-lighters, a petrochemical, napalm-like substance squirted out of a plastic bottle, matches, much swearing, frantic fanning with a randomly found flap of cardboard, a strong suggestion of danger, eye-stinging smoke… and badly cooked food.
(As I always tell my guests when I serve them vegan burgers that are raw on the inside and burned to crap on the outside, “It’s actually quite hard to kill people with vegan food!” And thus far, that’s holding true.)
Don’t get me wrong. I get the logic of the electric barbecue. You could cook your evening meal on it day after day if you got a stretch of good weather, where with a charcoal barbecue this would be wasteful and expensive, and frankly it’s enough hassle that having done it once, its several weeks before you feel like doing it again.
But cooking food outdoors isn’t why I have a barbecue. Merely eating food outdoors doesn’t make it a barbecue. Cooking food outdoors isn’t intrinsically a barbecue. I don’t even particularly like the outdoors! A barbecue is, well, a barbecue. And if my reason for having a barbecue differs from yours, then my emotional definition of what a barbecue is, well it’s inevitably going to differ from yours, too.
But that’s fine.
Your electric barbecue doesn’t threaten my charcoal barbecue. And my negative, emotional reaction to your barbecue doesn’t usurp your reasonable, practical wish to use it. Words have meanings, but those meanings can be flexible, morphing into different contexts as required. We’re never going to agree over the precise definition of each word.
There’s a lesson there, right?
A bunch of you are probably at this point (metaphorically) looking knowingly at me and saying, this is actually about trans rights, isn’t it Jonny? At which point I would inform you that it’s actually about certain celebrities whose definition of the word “author” includes “A person who falsely claims sole authorship of a non-biographical work of fiction or non-fiction that was in fact written by someone else with little or no creative involvement by the celebrity”, a definition with which I vehemently disagree.
(It’s about trans rights).
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