Nah, totally avoidable. It's unavoidable with people who went to small northern-south New York liberal arts colleges.
(Which are obscenely expensive, in what I just now realized is probably a region-specific but helpful piece of background information. There are layers and layers.)
Also to quote another friend to whom I told the basic story because I'm tickled by it and want the world to hear (he was doing a thing where he used as many prepositional phrases with relative clauses as possible):
My Buddy Kyle
A disappointing first date is a terrible thing by which the suffering caused is not adequately conveyed by the term "disappoint first date." To put away our similes and our metaphors and our other crude linguistic devices and speak plainly, it is being trapped near a person into which a conversation with whom you must pour effort without hope of reaping any benefits at all, and, indeed, from which you know you will derive, instead of the expected joys, an increasing amount of discomfort, all with the reflected awareness that *they too* are hating every moment. It is that lowest of social engagements during which both parties knowingly participate in the prolonging of a mutually unwanted engagement. To sink to the level of figurative language, it is to agree with someone else, while admitting to each other that you'd rather not, to each stick a pin in each others' eyeballs. To throw on a hair shirt together.
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir