I took MrLittlePants to Waitsfield, VT as a birthday present last weekend. We stayed at the 1824 House Inn, a big and fancy bed & breakfast run by two queens, boasting an atmosphere of “relaxed elegance.”

It’s easy to speculate on the origins of the funny-looking concoction “relaxed elegance.” You can’t watch television without seeing a few ads wherein stuffy, invariably British-accented old people politely condemn some product, only to have an ill-mannered “cool guy” tear into the scene and flip their tour boat. (The trick is finding a guy so cool he can shill for the man without dimming his coolness.)

So if formality is best used (disingenuously) against your own product, how do you advertise a fancy dinner without evoking those blue-haired Brits? One answer is to claim that your brand of formality is “relaxed,” or—even more incredibly—“casual.”

In reality, it’s not possible for a setting to be either of those things. It’s up to a restaurant to be elegant, and the diners to be at ease there. Up-tightness has never been considered elegant, for a person or a place, and it’s only a very tired kind of comedy that would claim so.

Waiters at a proper formal restaurant don’t set out to intimidate diners: they set out to be invisibly efficient. (Waiters at trendy NYC informal restaurants, well, that’s another story.)

Advertising a kind of qualified formality, such as “casual elegance,” is an announcement that you really don’t get it in the first place.

This turned out to be the case with our well meaning hosts, who announced with great fanfare just about everything that happened on their property, whether it was a plate of “homemade blueberry pancakes with maple syrup” climactically meeting the table, or a hot tub that was about to reach 109 degrees.

Well, zippideedoo daa, we were the only guests there and having those two bears prancing and bowing around us got old pretty fast. That’s not to say that the house itself wasn’t beautiful (and elegant!); it was, and we had a fantastic time.

I did feel a little gypped when the dining package advertised on the web site was neither offered nor explained; we were charged the higher menu price for our dinner. (But that just supports an adage MrLittlePants and I coined in Rome: When in [insert current location], always ask the price before you accept any-goddamn-thing.)

All in all, the trip was well worth it and we would love to do it again sometime. We profited from the hosts’ snowshoes, twice, and every other amenity in the house.

I hope that someday, though, American culture will sort out its formality issues, perhaps with the help of a good shrink. My money’s on deeply rooted parental abuse—come on, that British accent is a dead giveaway.