Welcome to Money for the rest of us. This is a personal finance show on money, how it works, how to invest it, and how to live without worrying about it. I'm your host, David Stein. Today is episode 554. It's titled, There is no perfect portfolio, just good enough. Have you noticed over the past few years as you have interacted with personnel in the

hospitality space, whether you're at a restaurant, maybe you're at a hotel and you do something,

you order and they say perfect. Everything is perfect. And I'm not the only one that noticed it.

I actually looked to see if there had been

some academic study about that, because I don't remember hearing perfect as much a decade ago.

What's interesting, though, is perfect. The word, it comes from the Latin perfectus,

which means to finish or bring to completion. And that use of perfect is what we

see in grammar. In English, you have present perfect tense, past perfect, future perfect. Originally,

the word perfect meant completed, not flawless. But if we look at a essay found by Paula Morantz

Cohen in the Wall Street Journal back in

2022, she's a professor of English at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

The title of her piece was why everything is perfect.

And she used a phrase, she called it macro praise, where the speaker is just overdoing praise to people,

including saying, hey, perfect. Example she gives, quote, thank you, Stephen, for your excellent

question about whether we should be putting our trash cans closer to the curb. I think you are

100% right in raising this point. She thinks that maybe this idea to

over-exaggerate praise and use terms like perfect is some individuals, younger generations,

perhaps that's what she's saying, they have felt continually judged. And so there's either

you're wrong or it's perfect, no ambiguity in between.

Now, she had a suggestion to saying perfect all the time say good enough. So if you order at a

restaurant, the server will say good enough. I don't know if that's going to work or not.

We had, we had brunch the other day with a friend. Our server was Claire. She didn't say perfect. But she was an actor by training, very skilled. And she could have been, in fact, I suggested that she tried stand-up. She was that good. A friend asked her her name. And she said, my name is Claire. And he said, oh, that's a

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