Thursday, July 24, 2008

I did it! This is a landmark day!

This morning I stopped off at Starbucks on the way to work as I am wont to do. As always, I ordered in English: a "large" iced coffee with soy. Today, I got a newbie Starbucks person and when she relayed the order to the person who was making my drink, she also said it in English! She said a "large..." and then corrected herself and used the Starbuckese fake word for "large".

What a victory!!! Today one new Starbucks employee, tomorrow the entire chain!

Note: Look folks, in America, there are 3 sizes: small, medium and large. Small has to be bigger than what would be considered large in France. And large has to be really huge. If you're going to add a 4th size it has got to be XL. Your 5th must be XXL and so on. But you're really better off sticking with 3 sizes and using the word "small" to signify what anyone with eyes can plainly see is gargantuan. This way, we can all tell ourselves that it's really small and we're not pigs but really actually be pigs.

And when I say that the sizes are small, medium and large, I also mean that those are the words used for sizes in this country. Period. I have lots of respect for Starbucks' ability to get people to pay $4 for what they used to pay 50 cents for. But we can't have any more words. We already have too many words in this country. Bringing in phony words from somewhere else is exactly the opposite of what we need!

Frankly, if Starbucks really wanted to be extraordinary, they would make great coffee AND eliminate words from the English language. They could have a calendar with a word of the day, but the word of the day was the word that was being excised from English that day. And it would have no definition because you don't need to know it anyway because you are prohibited from using it ever again.

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