I feel a bit like Spider-Man caught in the symbiotic, alien clutches of the black costume: a disturbing change has come over me, and I can't quite figure out why. I am now one of those people who ignore Starbucks's tall/grande/venti nomenclature and order "medium" coffees and the like — straight up.
I don't know how long this has been going on. I noticed it for the first time a couple of weeks ago, I think, but for obvious reasons I buried the truth in some dark corner of my psyche, only to be unearthed earlier today when I realized that the barista at my neighborhood 'bucks was sanctioning me — tacitly, of course, but severely withal — for my thoughtless diction:
Me: I'll have a medium coffee and absolutely nothing else.*
Barista: Okay. [Turns to other barista.] Can I get a grande coffee, please?
Implicit corrections are absolutely the most pernicious form of clerk-on-customer verbal aggression. A cat I know from small(ish) times often gets a coffee–cum–espresso shot at Starbucks — something that's not even on the menu and hence something I kind of resent him for ordering (see "Neuroeconomics, Basically," Confessions of a Keyhole 13 Nov. 2006) — and baristas pretty much always reply by calling the drink, in passing and without the slighest shred of chalance, a "red eye." So what is he supposed to do? If he orders a "red eye" as such, he runs the risk of encountering the one barista who is not familiar with the term; that barista will probably pee in something. Besides, one doesn't want to cast oneself as too much of a knowing insider; it's slimy and pretentious. But if he keeps ordering a coffee with a shot of espresso, he runs the risk of coming off as a naïf, and an especially slow one at that — the baristas at Starbuckses that he frequents might start to wonder why this doofus can't twig to the fact that a "coffee&espresso" is just as bitter under another, more efficient, name. The implicit correction always produces dilemmas of this form without offering any guidance as to which tine of the fork it would be preferable to impale oneself on.
But my case is a simpler one: I know how to order properly; I just keep failing to do so. And come to think of it, this behavior pattern goes beyond Starbucks. When I was buying a soda the other day — a situation I'm rarely in — I asked for "Pepsi" at an establishment that only served Coke. In an act of almost divine mercy, the cashier made no comment and just got me a Coke; but, as if to let me know that I couldn't just get away with this kind of thing, my lady love gleefully pointed out my error. I can't even recall now if I had realized what I had done before she mentioned it. Has the disease progressed so far that I no longer even notice the symptoms?
What's wrong with me? Is this part of growing up — riding roughshod over the fine distinctions of commercial discourse? I've long associated this kind of attitude with old people, actually: some jowly windbag at a diner or something folding up a menu in bewilderment and impatience and barking out, "Just give me a burger! All I want is a regular burger. Jeez, can't you just get a burger anymore?" Similarly jowly types are often heard to carp about Starbucks in particular: it's impossible, they claim, to get a no-frills coffee (a manifest falsehood), or at least difficult to figure out how to order one amidst all the other complex and enticing options (closer to the truth). And once they manage to track down the regular coffee, they're certainly not going to debase themselves by uttering something as frou-frou as "grande."
Of course, the tall/grande/venti thing is kind of silly. It's hard to see what Starbucks gains from it; some brand consultant probably told them that it helps capture "mind share" or something, but any effect on the bottom line (which I'm pretty sure I've heard some people call "the top line" recently) is no doubt impossible to measure. Still, the nomenclature exists, and as far as I can tell it's not going away any time soon. An attentive, observant, and respectful person ought to swallow his or her objections and just go with it, if only to make things easier for the barista population.
But I'm an old, angry dude now, apparently, so what do I care?
*Okay, I admit it: I also got one of those big chocolate-chip cookies. Stop looking at my body that way.
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