There’s a sort of upheaval going on in the food-service stratum of my workplace; a recent re-jiggering of the employee benefit plan includes the sudden and complete cessation of a long-running 50% food discount at the various little food outlets in our buildings. The cafe in the building in which I don’t work had a little going out of business party just before new years — they didn’t want to bother trying to hack it charging full price — and the coffee stand in this building has introduced frequent-drinker punch cards. Buy 9, get one free, that sort of thing.

And the cafe in this building is advertising some specials for the new year, including something that I can’t quite make sense of:

small composed salad

It’s a salad, and small, that much I can work with unflinchingly. But it is also, uh, composed? Whence? Is the notion that, yes, your salad comes pre-built, no assembly required? Is it a calm, rational salad? Is there a musical theme?

Did they, god help us, misspell compost?

Google doesn’t offer any explanation. A search for “small composed salad” gave me 7 hits, including some redundancies (I look forward to being number 8). And none of them convinced me there was any argument for the unpuncutated “small composed salad”.