On the Origin of Ratings
On a scale of one to ten, where one is the bare minimum, the lowest creative output and weakest effort possible, and ten is complete and total, all encompassing and wholly accurate recreation of the universe as we know it and have yet to discover, I’d give our system of rating things about a 5/10. Maybe even a four.
There are a lot of things that can be rated and reviewed out there, and yet we’re using only a handful of scales. And hands may actually have something to do with that.
Think about it- most of us are lucky enough to be born with and keep five fingers throughout our lives. It’s only natural that rating on a scale of one to five developed, and only natural that – when confronted with something better than just a five – we anted up, threw both hands into the mix, and decided to start rating things out of ten.
Heck, we’ve all got two thumbs that don’t do anybody good just twiddling around. Using these distinct digits was just a way to stick out from the pack, as the sore thumb is wont to do.
But where and why did stars start factoring in?
Hey, that’s what Review Party Dot Com is here for. We are asking the hard questions. We are doing the limited research and liberal speculation necessary to produce a few thoughts and at least an answer or two along the way.
Now, we’ve briefly touched on the Michelin Stars (in our post on Ocean’s 13), but we’re going back beyond those stars. We’re going to the big bang of symbolic rating systems
*69
How’d you read that in your head? Star-sixtynine, right? Even though we know it’s an asterisk, that little symbol is often called a star, and for good reason. Just like a star or a child’s drawing of a sun, it’s a circle with lines streaming out of it. If you’re using black ink on white paper, that’s pretty much the best you can do.
And that’s what Mariana Starke used in her guidebooks of the 1820s, starting with the riveting Travels on the Continent: Written for the Use and Particular Information of Travellers, which she prefaces with the following:
Oh, did you just hear the record screech, because I did. So Ms. Starke is opting for exclamation points as a means of rating excellence in art. While it does kind of excite me to think about restaurants and desk lamps being rated with exclamation points, I feel like her use of !!!s is less a choice and more a necessity; girl likes her asterisks, she likes her daggers and doubledaggers, and she isn’t afraid to let the bullets fly.
It’s a wonder she didn’t use “ “ for ditto, for all the punctuation she uses.
But if she did nothing else, she inspired some sneaky men to borrow her system and shift it to stars, which became featured in the Murray handbooks (such as A Hand-book for Travellers on the Continent : Being a Guide through Holland, Belgium, Prussia and Northern Germany, and along the Rhine, from Holland to Switzerland : containing descriptions of the principal cities ... with an index map) from the 1830s on, and in the Baedecker guides in the mid-19th century (do you really want to see the German names? Fine: Die Schweiz. Handbuch für Reisende, nach eigener Anschauung und den besten Hülfsquellen bearbeitet).
Whether or not these men intended to compare things to celestial objects or just notation and typeface is not known. But once stars got their start, they certainly got hot.
A quick historical exploration…
In 1915, Edward O’Brien began editing The Best American Short Stories, serving up ratings of 0 to 3 stars, and I’ll just this snippet of his brutal, cutting, matter of fact description speak for itself:
The man refuses to even comment on them if they’re bad enough! He is well ahead of his time. And though fellow writers and editors frowned upon (and still frown) on applying ratings to books, ratings had value to the readers, so they blossomed from there.
In 1928, the New York Daily News began using a scale of 1 to 3 to rate movies, and by the 1950s, many newspapers included critics’ star ratings.
Restaurants we’ve been over. Michelin, 1926. Hotels? That’s where that Ocean’s 13 post was concerned. Hotels use diamonds, but we don’t need to talk about them.
Why not? Because we can talk about military ranks instead. Five-star ranks are the biggest of the big in the US armed forces. These are the Admirals, Marshals, and the Generals. The grizzled ones with gunmetal glares.
In American football, college prospects are ranked on a five star scale.
All of those safety ratings on the car commercials (the IIHS, the NHSTA, EuroRAP, EuroNCAP); they use five star rating scales, and lives depend on those.
Popular online marketplace Amazon uses a five star rating scale, and LIVES DEPEND ON THOSE.
Even in the blinding blue light of a laptop or a smartphone, we stare at stars all day. They surround us and nothing can drown them out.
And maybe that’s the way it should be. Maybe that should be the equivalent of the metric system, the scale that everyone agrees on, so everyone knows what everyone means, all around the world, from now and forever into the future.
But don’t we lose a bit of romance when we drop these silly, personal preferences? Feet and inches and pounds are inherently funny, because we’re measuring based on a body, some dead person’s body.
Slightly less related, but still worth bringing up; I wrote about the term Indian Summer in an email newsletter (sign up at the bottom of our home page). I wondered aloud-in-text if that was a racist or at least offensive term, and found out that no, it’s just what the phenomenon of a mild autumnal period was called when it was described to Europeans. What I also discovered is that in Turkey, it is referred to as pastirma yazı, or pastrami summer, since November is the best time to make pastrami.
I don’t want global uniformity to cover up that sort of flavor. I give that name !!!!! out of five. Man that felt good.
So the next time you’re describing a great meal or a bad date, pause a second, savor the memory in your mind like a salty piece of pastrami, and bust out something other than a star or a number between one and ten. Whatever you come up with just might catch on.
