In today’s postimgs on the bon appétit magazine’s website, “Why the Last Thing You’ll Ever Need Is an Avocado Slicer” (a 6/16/16 piece by Alex Beggs). An illustration:
We are now in the the large KITCHEN-DEVICE category, the conceptual domain of implements, devices, tools, appliances, utensils, instruments, apparatuses, contraptions, and gadgets for use in the kitchen.
The lexical items above differ from one another, in small ways and large: for example, for utensil, the focus (in line with its etymology, going back to Latin utensilis ‘usable’) is on usefulness, while for gadget, the focus is on size, cleverness, and novelty (NOAD2: ‘a small mechanical device or tool, especially an ingenious or novel one’). The items in the illustration are gadgets, but their makers are inclined to market them as utensils. The bon appétit piece disputes that:
Knives are scary! And humans have credit cards, which means the market was riper than a black mushy avocado for an avocado slicer. Another contraption for your bottomless junk drawer and seemingly bottomless AmEx limit.
There are suddenly tons of these things, and the pros at Cook’s Illustrated tested ALL of them, or very close to all of them, since more keep popping up in Bed, Bath, and Beyond every day in various shades of Shrek. They also tested them with different varieties of avocados! It was downright scientific. Hundreds of avocados were sacrificed to the guacamole gods … There was a “steady stream” of avocado toast, too. They determined: Pointless.
Useless and annoying. Use a knife.
June 19, 2016 at 4:15 am |
The author of the ‘Unclutterer’ blog likes to call such devices ‘unitaskers,’ and regularly posts mocking examples.