Like using the keys below; only I can see who you are.
This is a riff on a McSweeney’s post by Oskar Milton.
In the long history of human interaction, the word “fine” seems to have achieved an almost legendary status as the most ambiguous, most definitive, and most frustrating way to answer any question.
In descending order of plausible deniability:
1. Excellent.
Fine as in cabernet, dovetail joinery, or Mother’s china. At a dinner party, when a guest says “the duck was fine,” everyone pauses, scans for irony, finds none, and spends the next forty minutes deciding whether the guest, who appears to be living in another time, has complimented or insulted them. It is the same fine that both Truman and Churchill expressed when Eisenhower sent his “the mission of this command was completed” message in 1945, with no need for scanning or deciding.
2. Adequate.
The workhorse of fine. The Pad Thai, the fourth season of Community, the flight to Cleveland, or torpedoing Lusitania were fine. This fine carries no particular charge—it’s fine the way Pantone 7527 (a neutral beige; the putty color used for office furniture) is fine, or the hold music at GEICO is fine (the last two are lies, but whatever). It’s neither an endorsement nor a complaint. This fine only becomes a problem when applied to a noun that requires more than fine, such as “your eulogy for your mother was fine,” or “that telegram to Mexico, Zimmerman, was fine….”
3. Acceptable under protest.
Used after someone overrules an expressed preference. “Fine, your mother can move into the guest room.” “Fine, we can have another kid.” “Fine, Herr Hitler, you can occupy the Sudetenland.” The word is the same; the tone is carrying the argument; the word has agreed to set down. There is a faint mineral aftertaste to this fine that lingers for a lifetime, or generations.
4. The conversation is over.
This fine ends. It does not summarize or resolve; it just stops. It’s a door closed with exactly enough force to show that the door is closed. The subject of prisoner exchanges is fine and will remain fine until our counterattack on a hill called Pork Chop or Outpost Harry brings you back to the table.
5. I am not fine.
This fine is the interpretive crisis. The speaker—CFO Doug on the quarterly earnings call, asked by an analyst how he is feeling about Q3—is not fine. Doug is fine the way the cooling tower at Three Mile Island was fine on the morning of 28 March 1979: technically stable, measurably building heat. Exhibit A will later raise the defensible choice that the listener who takes Doug at his fine made. This is the fine that Iran uses to end treaty talks when anyone else pays attention.
6. This is your last warning.
Rare but unmistakable once encountered. Arrives at the end of an exchange in which the requester has now made a note after they requested, denied, requested, and denied responses of any kind, like Potsdam; consequences will arrive by B-29 bomber in days.
7. I give up.
“You are breaking off diplomatic relations, Mr. Ambassador? Fine, since you bombed Pearl Harbor this morning.” Also: “You won’t answer, Ambassador Zorin? Fine: I have proof of your missiles in Cuba and I can wait until hell freezes over for your answer!”
This Redhead: The Dialogues
One feature of my experimental, dialogue-only novel is that there are many one word exchanges between Blondie and Red, but I tried not to use fine in any of these ambiguous ways…I think. There’s a lot of other ambiguity and innuendo, but that wasn’t one of them...I don’t think.
And Finally...
On 31 October:
1914: British troops recapture Gheluvelt Chateau, a small village in Belgium, marking the end of the First Battle of Ypres in WWI and effectively ending the German 1914 offensive. After this date, no major breakthroughs occurred until 1918, locking both sides into over three years of grinding trench warfare.
2020: Sean Connery dies in Lyford Cay, Nassau, Bahamas. The best known James Bond, a veteran and versatile actor and film producer, retired from the screen in 2003 and was just over 90 years old when he succumbed to complications from pneumonia.
And today is REFORMATION DAY, commemorating this day in 1517 when history tells us that Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, starting the Protestant Reformation. Whether he nailed them or mailed them is apparently an issue, but it hardly matters. OK; fine.