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Comment by saimiam | Hacker News Reader

Mildly offtopic:

Why does everything perfectly ordinary and expected in any other city have to become "Great" in an American city?

Across the world, restaurants, from the very basic to the very high end, arise around every agglomeration of people but here Bloomberg headlines these SFOs restaurants "Great". What makes them "great" that a decades old Irani restaurant in Mumbai cannot hope to match?

I can think of only one other place where "great" gets applied to very very ordinary things - Great Asian Cities when referring to Asian mega cities like Mumbai or Manila.

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The English word great has two distinct senses when describing a quality:

1. One of the best, truly magnificent (Michelangelo was a great artist.)

2. Better than something you would describe as "good". (How are you doing, Bob? - I am doing great, what about you?)

In modern American culture, "good" is often seen as normal and expected. Which means "great" turns into merely better than normal or expected. I think that is the sense in which the word is used in the article.

In some other cultures or languages, the same notion might be described as "not bad".

For want of a better description, the American vernacular lends itself to clickbait?

Or perhaps the American vernacular has been long shaped by the advertising and news trends that have lead us to the world of clickbait?

For a class project once I was encouraged to skim advertisings from the late part of the 19th Century through the early 20th Century and there certainly is a case to be made that American media have been drowning in hyperbole and fantastic claims for a long time now.

In this case I would say there is a feeling of guilt that is overcompensating for the quality of the restaurants. Most of the people complaining about this phenomenon are the actual culprits. Even with liberal types, the past is way more appealing than the present.

The article is specifically about exceptionally good restaurants that are moderately priced. And San Francisco has historically been famous for this (at least I heard about it a lot growing up in Seattle).

As someone who goes out a lot and who was courted to move to SF by people who go out a lot, I can tell you that in 2015 SF restaurant scene does not hold a candle to NYC. It was one of the reasons I decided not to move to SF.

We Americans do tend to overuse superlatives. It's just part of our culture. A restaurant you enjoyed can't just be "good" or "decent", it has to "great". A nice vacation can't just be "relaxing" or "enjoyable" it will be described as "awesome".

"Amazing" is another word we tend to overuse.

As others have stated, we tend to overuse superlatives in American English. I try to avoid that, and have picked up a phrase for restaurants from a friend. He will sometimes describe a restaurant that is good, not great, but one he would go back to again, as "exceptionally adequate."

I interpreted it as "great" compared to the average American city.

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