The grammar of Starbucks (spoiler: it's just the grammar of English with other words)

Ah, Starbucks, home of weirdly huge coffees. Fun fact: since the popularity of flat whites in the UK, it's been much easier for me to get a coffee that's the strength and quantity that I like. An Americano is too big and too weak in all but the most hipster of coffee shops, but an espresso isn't enough coffee for a social drink. A black coffee in a flat white-sized cup is just right thanks (for some reason it's called a 'short black' or a 'long black' in places that recognise that this is a good drink, I assume as a calque of the Italian caffè lungo, which contrasts with just a caffè, which is an espresso). So I ask for that and responses range from just doing what I asked for to utter bafflement from the barista and ultimately a weirdly big coffee for me. Guess which one of those is the Starbucks response. 

It's already weird that the smallest size they have on the menu is 'tall'. At some point, they introduced 'venti' as the biggest coffee - 20oz, which is a pint. A literal pint. Apparently there's now 'trenta', which I assume is 30oz, which is getting on for a litre. So those are size names which are specific to Starbucks, and you just have to know them but it's easy enough to work out that there's a scale of sorts. No big deal. 

This Economist article talks about the language of Starbucks, saying that they 'refer... to macchiatos as 'marble' and mochas as 'zebra'', and putting this down to an effort to create an in-group feeling among its customers: having a language that you and your group know, being part of the crowd, being part of a community. It also says that 

Starbucks even uses its own grammar: you say your size before your syrup, your preferred milk before your primary drink.

OK, we're in my wheelhouse now if we're talking grammar. And... I'm not sure what this is meant to mean. This really just describes the rules of English. If I wanted a large caramel soya latte then that's what I'd say. The adjectives go before the noun, in the order the author mentions with the size first, and the drink type (the 'head' of the phrase) goes at the end. I couldn't ask for a soya large caramel latte, or a latte caramel soya large, or anything else. I could ask for a large latte with soya milk, taking the milk choice out of the noun phrase stack and putting it at the end in a prepositional phrase, and I could do the same with the syrup: a large soya latte with caramel syrup. Notice that if I do this, I need to add in a new noun for soya and caramel to refer to, because I've removed them from their place in the latte noun phrase and put them in a different noun phrase in that extra prepositional phrase at the end (with syrup/milk). At a push I could even take out the size: a caramel soya latte, and make it a large one. But if I'm putting all the bits in the same phrase, modifying just one noun (latte), then they go in the order the Economist author says is special to Starbucks grammar. 

If you want to create an eye-catching linguistics gimmick, you can play with words as much as you like, because we learn new words all the time and we can learn new ones. You can't really play with sounds or structures, though. Sorry Starbucks. Your grammar is nice but it's just English. 

Plan B: Stay home instead

Sometimes, the trains are disrupted for engineering works, usually over Christmas and New Year when fewer people are travelling on expensive peak time commuter tickets that would be costly to lose out on or refund. When they announce the disruption in advance, the standard message is something like this:

There will be no trains on the following days. Please make a Plan B for your journey. 

Here's an example of exactly this:

You may need a plan B to get to London at bank holidays and some working days. More details closer to the time, but be aware of these dates pic.twitter.com/EjveOsHWjd

— Southeastern (@Se_Railway) January 31, 2017

I was thinking about this once because there was no other way for me to make my journey, so my only option was simply to not go. This doesn't count as a Plan B, though! Plan B can only be an alternative means of achieving the same ends as Plan A. 

So let's say that Plan A was to catch a High Speed Southeastern train to London on May Day bank holiday. This isn't possible because they're doing some works and there are no High Speed trains on that line that day. A suitable Plan B would be to catch a slow train to London on that day. It isn't quite as good but it achieves the end of going to London that day. Or you could get a bus, if there were no trains at all, or you could drive, if you were able to. All would get you to your chosen destination on your chosen day. 

Would getting the train to London on another day count as a Plan B? It might, but only if you could do the original thing you were going to do. Maybe you were going to meet a friend, and you decide to do it on Tuesday instead of Monday. I think that would just about count as a Plan B for your original intentions. But if you were going to an event on that Monday, then going another day doesn't allow you to do what you were going to do, so it's not a good Plan B. 

Staying at home instead, as I had to do when I first mused about this announcement, definitely doesn't count as a Plan B for your original journey - you haven't managed to make the journey at all. But it would count as a Plan B for your holiday plans, for instance. Let's say Plan A was to go and spend Christmas with your parents, but because of work and trains, you can't get there, so you decide to spend Christmas at home. That's a Plan B for the Christmas holidays, but not a Plan B for your journey. The difference is what is under discussion, and therefore what Plan B is an alternative to. 

Religion means lack of religion

We've got some new legislation to make the latest guidance on how many people can hang out together absolutely clear as mud. One of the things you're allowed to have up to 30 people in one place for is religious gatherings and their non-religious equivalents in the case of weddings and funerals and so on. It's written in a way that implies that weddings are religious ('weddings and other religious life-cycle events'; 'other' meaning 'as well as the one just mentioned'), which of course they may not be at all, or they may be a fundamentally religious thing - that's dependent on your religion and beliefs. So then they qualify this with the following wording (it's the same wording as in the EHRC, I just hadn't read it before as I don't make a habit of reading legislation): 

(1) Religion means any religion and a reference to religion includes a reference to a lack of religion. (2) Belief means any religious or philosophical belief and a reference to belief includes a reference to a lack of belief.

Pragmatically, you wouldn't normally include 'lack of X' in the meaning of X. More likely, we add a bit of meaning along the lines of 'if relevant' - the old joke about the boy who was late to school because there was a sign saying 'dogs must be carried' and it took him ages to find one relies on this, as the boy failed to infer the usual additional meaning 'if one is present'. 

When we use nouns (like 'religion') usually, we don't include the lack of that noun in their meaning. When I say that the purpose of university is to provide an education, I'm not including 'lack of education'. If I say that the role of politicians is governance, I don't normally include 'lack of governance' in that (insert your own wry comments here). 

You can sort of fiddle with this to fit in with that interpretation, if you say that 'religious' applies only where relevant, like the 'dogs must be carried' sign. But in fact it's more a reflection of the fact that rather than the default being religion and not having religion is a lack of the thing (X or not-X), we now recognise that lack of religion is an ideological stance as much as having religion. The fact that there are many religions probably makes this meaning easier to arrive at, because rather than X or not-X, we have options A, B, C, and D, where one of them is a lack of any religious belief, or 'none of the above'. 

Mishearing condemnation, literally and metaphorically

On the news last week, it was announced that Boris Johnson (UK Prime Minister) had accused Keir Starmer (leader of the opposition) of condemning the IRA (Irish Republican Army, who committed many violent acts in the Northern Ireland conflict in the second half of the 20th century, during some of which time Starmer worked there). 

The British government generally sees itself as in the right in this conflict, as neutral peacekeepers, and I'm not going to get into the politics of it because it's complicated and I don't quite see how an occupying nation can actually be neutral, but certainly the IRA in the 1980s and 90s is on the list of terrorist organisations and killed many civilians in brutal ways. I was therefore surprised to hear Johnson accusing Starmer of condemning them, not because I don't think he would condemn them, but because he accused him of it. 

To accuse someone means that you think they shouldn't have done the thing. Behold these examples of interactions between us and the dogs, in which the first two examples are bad things, and thus the kind of things you can be accused of, and the second two are good things, and so accusing someone of them is infelicitous: 

Arrow accused Blanquita of sitting on his tail.

Blanquita accused Arrow of taking up too much space. 

*Jim accused Blanquita of behaving very well. 

*Laura accused Arrow of walking nicely on his lead. 

So to accuse Starmer of condemning the IRA means that Johnson thinks (a) that Starmer has condemned the IRA and (b) that Starmer ought not to condemn the IRA. (b) is the surprising part, as noted above. It turns out that the newsreader misspoke (or I misheard) and the word was condone, which in fact means the exact opposite of condemn and is entirely consistent with the political relations and the implications of the word accuse. Starmer has asked him to retract the accusation; it rumbles on. 

From that literal misheard condemn to a condemnation of a mishearing. In a twitter thread, the conversation turned to prescriptivism and bugbears about speech, as it so often does if you talk about language on the internet. Someone I don't know complained about double superlatives like bestest and cited a song lyric that contains the double comparative more deadlier: The female of the species is more deadlier than the male. I only know of one song with that lyric and it's one I know very well because I absolutely loved the band as a teenager: it's 'The female of the species' by Space, and the lyric is The female of the species is more deadly than the male. I've double checked with google and everything. In the course of my checking I learnt that there is a Walker Brothers song called Deadlier than the male, but there's no 'more' in the lyric, so again, just a single comparative, not double. And I also learnt that the Space song is based on a Kipling line, which is, again, more deadly. So this Person on the Internet has managed to get annoyed by something that doesn't exist, which happens a lot when people get angry about so-called culture wars and also English usage (hey it's almost like in fact the language peeves are a proxy for their dislike of women, working class people and Black people), but it would really help people's blood pressure if they just didn't. 

Dictionary update ahoy!

I always think of dictionaries as like a huge, slow-moving (but graceful) sea creature, a sort of enormous beast like the avanc in Mieville's The Scar, making inexorable steady progress. Lexicographers probably feel very nimble and agile, skipping through language and keeping abreast of linguistic change as it eddies around them and I'm doing them a terrible disservice. 

Print dictionaries, of course, are hopelessly out of date before they're even published. Online dictionaries can include much more recent usage, though they still tend to be a few years behind what we think of as current, because they need to include general usage with evidence, not just Jay from down the road's definition of a word. 

Dictionary.com published an article about its latest update, with a very thorough overhaul of its entries, including adding #MeToo and af. It's also updated the language in some of its older entries too, though. For instance, it capitalises Black now when referring to Black people/culture, following style guides including AP in doing so. It has also separated out the entries for the word more generally (e.g. the colour) and when it refers to people: 

In the dictionary world, separating the people-related definitions of Black from the other definitions of black is a major—and extremely rare—move. As a rule, different senses of words that share an origin, as lowercase black and uppercase Black historically do, are included under the same entry. It’s a rule worth breaking. Dictionaries are not merely a linguistic exercise or academic enterprise. What are the effects of Black, referring to human beings, being grouped together with black, which can mean, among other things, “wicked”? The effects are social. They are psychological. They are personal. How words are entered into the dictionary—especially words concerning our personal identities—have real effects on real people in the real world.

It's also  reworded the entries referring to gay or gayness to remove the term homosexuality (they now use gay sexual orientation instead). They note that homosexuality now has connotations of 'pathology, mental illness, and criminality'. Whether it always has done, I don't know - one can check these things using concordances and corpora. But this is an interesting case of specialisation, where the term gay has become the default term, and so the use of another term carries some extra layer of meaning and now those connotations are very strong and the word is no longer (if it ever was) neutral. It's a technical-sounding, scientific word, so it makes sense that it would be used for technical things like medical or legal contexts. 

Take a look at the whole article. It's really worth reading, and it includes this list of words that they consider to be late-2010s-defining:

amirite
battle royale
contouring
dead white male
DGAF
Dunning-Kruger effect
empty suit
gender reveal
GOAT
hodophobia
ish
information bubble
jabroni
janky
MAGA
MeToo
nothingburger
swole
world-building
zhuzh