It is also a scene, though, that made for one of the film’s many lasting cultural contributions. According to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, it was When Harry Met Sally that popularized the term high-maintenance in American culture. And there it has remained, its use climbing steadily over the past 30 years. An assessment that is also a rebuke, high-maintenance is one of those breezy truisms that is so common, it barely registers as an insult. But the term today does precisely what it did 30 years ago, as backlash brewed against the women’s movement: It serves as an indictment of women who want. It neatly captures the absurdity of a culture that in one breath demands women do everything they can to “maintain” themselves and, in the next, mocks them for making the effort. She wears makeup? High-maintenance. She shops? High-maintenance. She’d prefer the turkey burger? High-maintenance.

As insults go, just as Harry intuited, high-maintenance is extremely effective: Once introduced, it can’t really be argued with. (She is annoyed to be dismissed as high-maintenance? This is, obviously, the clearest evidence of all.) Sally, in the scene that popularized the term, resists the label—or tries to. “I don’t see that,” she protests, when Harry informs her that she is the worst kind. Harry replies with a dramatic rendering of one of her extremely specific restaurant orders: the house salad, but not with the standard dressing, and with the substituted version on the side. The salmon, but with the mustard sauce, and that sauce on the side. “On the side is a very big thing for you,” he concludes.

“Well, I just want it the way I want it,” she says.

“I know. High-maintenance.”

It’s so casual. It’s so bluntly efficient. The man, inventing the categories, and the woman, slotted into them. The man exempt; the woman, implicated. When Harry Met Sally aspired to operate as a kind of allegory—one of the movie’s working titles was the teasingly vague Boy Meets Girl—and there is an aptness to the idea that its hero’s way of reckoning with the world is to reduce it to easy rankings. (On Mallomars: “the greatest cookie of all time.” On Sally: “Empirically, you are attractive.”) Harry’s taxonomic tendencies double as defenses, yes, and as attempts to exert control over life’s chaos. But they are also one of his defining character traits. And, because of that, they infuse the film. One of Harry’s swaggering pronouncements—“No man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive”—is also the movie’s central premise, and its question is meant to leap off the screen and into the open spaces of audiences’ lives. Can’t he? What if they—? But how about—?

As for Harry’s cold assessment of the world’s “two kinds of women,” the effect might well be the same for the women who watch the film as it was for the one who starred in it. The diagnosis might lead them to question things that don’t really require questioning. Which is also to say that it might lead them to question themselves: Which one am I?