Life and Language -New coffee, New English

I was in London recently and had time to kill, so I decided to stop somewhere for a coffee. It’s not difficult these days. Everywhere you go, especially in the UK, there are places to get coffee  - from major chains to independent cafes. The rise and rise of coffee consumption globally is phenomenal, and the British drink more coffee than ever before. I don’t know if we now drink more coffee than the tea which our steroetype would normally demand, but I know it must be a lot. For my own part, when I’m travelling or even at a loose end in town anywhere, sooner or later I’ll go for a coffee or two. Even when I don’t really want one. When and why did I suddenly need to drink all this coffee? What did I do with my time (and money!) when I wasn’t spending so much time in cafes?

Anyway, I went into this coffee house, and I joined the queue. I noticed the cafe is busy and full, but there were only two people in front of me, which was good because it gave me time to look at the vast menu of coffee choice. How on Earth did coffee become so varied and complex? There are cafe lattes, cappuccinos, espressos, Americanos, machiatos, mochaccinos, frappaccinos, Al Pacinos (just kidding) to name a few (more Italian than English!), and then you need to know what size you want. Why can’t all the cafes agree on the simple vocabulary of size? Few say small is small, as most say a small is tall, which doesn’t sound at all small to me (and often isn’t). Some say large where others say grande. Some places even acknoweldge that we have no idea what they mean by these terms for size, and have to put on display three cups which the assistant can point to show us what they mean. It’s absurd, when you think about it.

When ordering a coffee you then have to confirm if you want it black or white (with milk? cream? semi-skimmed? half and half?) with sugar (which is hidden in another part of the cafe), take-away or sit-in, and would I like an extra shot? Or would I like vanilla? Or chocolate? Or caramel?  Or whipped cream? These days it’s hard to know where coffee stops being a coffee and starts becoming a dessert.

I then heard the young man at the front of the queue say, ‘Can I get a latte?’ which is interesting on a few points. Firstly, he’s abbreviated caffe latte (literally coffee with milk) to just latte. So if you know basic Italian, the man is really just asking for milk. And in the south of England, it will often be pronounced ‘lah-tay’. Or even with a glottal stop instead of the /t/ sound.

Secondly, he’s using get instead of have. This is more and more normal English usage now, but it drives me mad. For me, get is to ‘fetch’ in some way, not receive in this sense, but who am I to resist the necessary inevitability of language change? Ironically, in most cases, you do literally have to get your coffee, because once you’ve spent the best part of twenty minutess narrowing down choices to explain the coffee you actually want, it is then processed - slowly and with much hissing, banging and pouring - and sent to the end of the counter, so you do have to physcially move and get it. Get it?.

Well the next guy in the queue didn’t get it at all, the poor chap. He must have been about 70, though by no means daft or slow, but I could already see he was becoming flustered at the overwhelming choice and explanations which lay before him. If this wasn’t bad enough, I was also waiting to see how he would cope with the accents and grammar of the non-native speakers about to serve him.

If you read any books about the globality of English, you won’t have to read for long to learn that over 3/5 of the English speaking population in the world are non-native speakers. This is particularly true of anyone serving you in a major city in the UK. London, especially (but not exclusively). I should emphasise that this is by no means a judgement, but merely an important observation, as the the impact on communication with a London-born old aged pensioner and his desire for coffee can be horrendous.

His turn to order at the counter went a bit like this:

 

Old man:               Can I have a coffee? [no ‘please’, but correct use of have. His accent was a beautiful    London cockney]

Assistant:             What you want? [a lovely Eastern European accent from a pleasant young man trying to   be helpful]

Old man:               A coffee. I want a coffee. [not exactly polite and sounding a little irritated, but clearly    spoken]

Assistant:              What kind coffee you want? [helpful, but heavily accented. I fear the worst]

Old man:               I just want a coffee. A coffee. [more irritation. He’s realising the assistant is not English,                          or at least not a non-native speaker]

Assistant:              There is a lot of coffee [waving at the menu of coffees behind him]

Old man:               I know. A small one. [he can see the menu but can’t believe it must all be about coffee,                           so ignores it]

Assistant:              You want latte? [helpful, still, but fears this will slow down the queue]

Old man:               Eh? [he leans closer, hoping the word will soon make sense]

Assistant:              A latte.

Old man:              What’s a latte?

Assistant:              t’s a coffee with milk.

Old man:              Yes, I want a coffee with milk [implying ‘is that too much to ask in a cafe?’ But adds...]                             But not much.

Assistant:              Not much?

Old man:              No, not much. Not much milk.

Assistant:              Latte is milk. Hot milk.

Old man:              No! I don’t want hot milk. I just want a coffee.

Assistant:              Latte is coffee.

Old man:              You said it was hot milk.

Assistant:              It is hot milk but with espresso.

Old man:              With what?

 

The old man then turned to me, annoyed and bemused and says to me, and to the world at large:

 

Old man:                 I just want a bloody coffee.

 

At this point I step in and find myself translating English into Coffee English to help him out.

 

Me: [to assistant] I think he wants an Americano.

Old man:              I want a what?

Me:                     An Americano. It’s a coffee.

Old man:              That’s what I said. A coffee. Americano? Why Americano?

Me:                      I don’t know.

Old man:              I told him I wanted a coffee. I can’t understand him.

Assistant:              What does he want?

Assistant:              He wants an Americano

Old man:              Coffee with milk.

Assistant:              You’ll have to put your own milk in. It’s probably over there.

Old man:              Over where? Put my own milk in? What sort of place is this?

Assistant:              You want tall one?

Old man:               A small one. Yes.

Assistant:                No, tall.

Old man:                No, not tall. Small.

Me:                       Tall is small.

Old man:                Tall is small? What’s are you on about?

Me:                       These days, you can have three sizes of coffee, small, medium or large. They call small                            tall here.

Old man:                That’s ridiculous. Why can’t they say small or large?

Me:                       I honestly have no idea.

Old man:                I give up. I just want a coffee.

 

And before I could get him what he wanted, he turned and left muttering angrily under his breath. I’ll never know if he ever got his coffee somwhere else. And won’t he encounter the same problem everywhere else? We’ll never know. Maybe it’s the end of coffee drinking for the over 70s. I looked back at the assistant, graded my language to a clear pre-intermediate level and used appropriate meta-language to get (or have) what I wanted, and sat down to think about how I put that into my ELT materials.

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