‘I hate sneak previews,’ said my husband. I think he was talking to the wireless, as he often does, not to me, since a broadcaster had just promised him a sneak preview. I agree that the terminology is annoying, as it is generally used as a ploy to pique interest in a subject, otherwise of no interest, by offering stolen pleasure.
I am just as annoyed by an attempt to train our consumption as though we were pet dogs. On a train I was given a free shortbread biscuit, and on the wrapper it was labelled ‘Sweet treats’. Now, I regard shortbread as tolerable only if I am very hungry. But in the praxis of ‘healthy eating’, a treat is something you are allowed infrequently; otherwise, if it is a radish or some roasted chickpeas, it qualifies as a snack. Biscuits, crisps? ‘Those are treats, not snacks,’ says Cara Rosenbloom in the Washington Post, chidingly – or she says so of cookies and potato chips, which amount to the same thing in America.
With a treat, the question is who does what to whom. It is no easier to treat yourself than it is to tickle yourself. This is obviously true when treating means paying for food or drink. In 1910, Sir Henry Seymour King celebrated his 25 years as MP for Kingston-on-Hull by buying sweets for children and coal for the poor. As a consequence, a petition was lodged in parliament against him, under the Corrupt Practices Prevention Act 1854, which prohibited the ‘treating’ of electors, and he was deprived of his seat.
In 1915, David Lloyd George, then chancellor of the Exchequer, was on a crusade to make people drink less, it being wartime. A No-Treating Order was imposed, making it obligatory for any drink in a pub to be paid for by the person supplied.
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