Gricean bagel rage
Rosenthal, at Starbucks, NYC:
-- A toasted multigrain bagel, please
-- Do you want butter or cheese?
--- (silence). You are an arsehole.
-------- Cops intervene
Rosenthal's point: "it would be otiose to have to specify what you do NOT want".
--
Comments on Liberman's blog --
Liberman writes (adapted)
"When Grice drafted his maxims for cooperative conversation, he didn't have in mind that we should get upset when people violate them."
Didn't he?
"On the contrary, the whole idea was to use apparent violations as the basis for reasoning about conversational implicatures, the things that people obviously mean but don't literally say. Still, people do get upset about all aspects of other people's language use, and it's common to object to redundancy, as in "ATM machine""
---
Well, it's more object to 'overinformativeness', right? The category of Quantity (which Grice retrieved humoristically from Kant --. No 'avoid redundacy', really.
Lieberman:
"— though members of what William Safire used to call the Squad Squad rarely get as upset as the anonymous "pilotless drone" man did ("Is it sinking into your thick skull, you high school drop-out?", 2/7/2007)."
"It's even rarer for usage disputes to escalate to the point where police intervention is required. But I've now gotten a dozen emails drawing my attention to a recent linguistic fracas where the cops were asked to rule on a matter involving conversational implicature. According to J. Doyle, R. Rosenberg and A. Karni, "Grammar stickler: Starbucks booted me", N.Y. Post 8/16/2010: "Starbucks' strange vernacular finally drove a customer nuts. L. Rosenthal, a college English prof from Manhattan, said 3 cops forcibly ejected her from an Upper West Side Starbucks yesterday morning after she got into a dispute with a counterperson — make that barista — for refusing to place her order by the coffee chain's rules. Rosenthal, who is in her early 60s, asked for
A toasted multigrain bagel, please.
— and she became enraged when the barista at the franchise, on Columbus Avenue at 86th Street, followed up by inquiring,
Do you want butter or cheese?
"I just wanted a multigrain bagel," she told The Post. "I refused to say 'without butter or cheese.' When you go to Burger King,
You don't have to list the six things you do NOT want.
"Linguistically, it's stupid. And I'm a stickler for correct English."
Let's stipulate that the question of when and how customers should have to specify what they don't want is not a matter of grammar, as such, and go on to learn more about what happened on that fateful West Side morning. Yesterday's breakfast-bagel tussle heated up when the barista told the prickly prof that he wouldn't serve her unless she specified whether she wanted a schmear of butter or cheese — or neither.
"I yelled, 'I want my multigrain bagel!' " Rosenthal said.
"The barista said, 'You're not going to get anything unless you say butter or cheese!' " But Rosenthal, on principle, refused to back down. "I didn't even want the bagel anymore," she said.
The bagel brouhaha escalated until the manager called cops, and responding officers ordered her to leave, threatening to arrest her if she went back inside, she said.
"It was very humiliating to be thrown out, and all I did was ask for a bagel," recalled Rosenthal, who said she holds a Ph.D. from Columbia.
"If you don't use their language, they refuse to serve you. They don't understand what a plain multigrain bagel is."
"There's some evidence in the story that possible violations of the maxims of quantity and manner were not the only points at issue."
A Starbucks employee who witnessed the incident blamed Rosenthal.
"She would not answer. It was a reasonable question," the worker said.
"She called [the barista] an a- -hole."
Most of those who have sent me links to this story have been disappointed that the dispute was not over the nomenclature of different coffee serving sizes, as featured in Paul Rudd's "Venti is twenty" rant from the movie Role Models:
Or Dave Barry's classic Ask Mister Language Person column ("Latte lingo: Raising a pint at Starbucks", 11/30/2004):
"We begin today with a disturbing escalation in the trend of coffee retailers giving stupid names to cup sizes."
"As you know, this trend began several years ago when Starbucks (motto: "There's one opening right now in your basement") decided to call its cup sizes "Tall" (meaning "not tall," or ''small"), "Grande" (meaning "medium") and "Venti" (meaning, for all we know, "weasel snot").
"Unfortunately, we consumers, like moron sheep, started actually USING these names. Why? If Starbucks decided to call its toilets "AquaSwooshies," would we go along with THAT? Yes! Baaa!"
"Recently, at the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport and Death March, Mister Language Person noticed that a Starbuck's competitor, Seattle's Best Coffee (which also uses "Tall" for small and "Grande" for medium) is calling ITS large cup size — get ready — "Grande Supremo."
"Yes. And as Mister Language Person watched in horror, many customers — seemingly intelligent, briefcase-toting adults — actually used this term, as in, "I'll take a Grande Supremo.""
"Listen, people: You should never, ever have to utter the words "Grande Supremo" unless you are addressing a tribal warlord who is holding you captive and threatening to burn you at the stake."
"JUST SAY YOU WANT A LARGE COFFEE, PEOPLE."
"Because if we let the coffee people get away with this, they're not going to stop, and some day, just to get a lousy cup of coffee, you'll hear yourself saying""
"I'll have a Mega Grandissimaximo Giganto de Humongo-Rama-Lama-Ding-Dong decaf."
"And then you will ask for the key to the AquaSwooshie. And when THAT happens, people, the terrorists will have won.
"In a comment on that 2004 post, Stefano Taschini expressed the opinion that the whole thing is really beside the point, because, 'I believe there must have been a small mistype: technically, a warm liquid that you ingest in quantities exceeding half a liter is "stock" not "coffee". In English, I think, the word infusion would also be appropriate (though I have to say that I myself am fond of the American-style coffee-bean-derived liquid, whatever you choose to call the substance and its various sizes). [Update — more discussion at the Economist's Johnson blog, and LOTS more discussion at Metafilter. Current counts on Google News suggest that the Starbucks v. Rosenthal story is getting more uptake than (say) the Marc Hauser story.]
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Equivocations again, right--fairly typical with bad journalism, when papers want to abbreviate headlines. or are they amphiboles instead? the amphibole seems to relate to the entire meaning of sentence ("no food's better than our food"), and generally unintentional. Equivocations are often deliberate (ie Sschackaspeare's fools punning). I am not sure that is much ...of philosophical interest. And also--with a different accent (ie spoken)...the meanings would be clear--something like, "NO food's better than our food (ie better not to eat than eat there). OR no food's better than OUR food..." etc
ReplyDelete[I attached this to the wrong post, Signore JL: it was in regard to the post about...amphiboly (e.g. "camp helps burn victims"). LO siento. So...connect the dots. Or don't].
ReplyDeletere Latte Lingo--I am in agreement for most part (tho' not really a fan of Barry's Twain-lite humor). A decade or so ago when the Starbucks craze started I ordered a "Tall," thinking it would be tall. Yet it was small. So had to rethink the sizes.
The blend names quickly became ludicrous. Espresso, OK--sort of traditional hipster flavor, but still exotic (and traditionally, like parisian existentialist tradition--any cream was verboten). Cappaccino, eh. Foreign, really until Starbux arrived. Then the lattes, the frappaccinos, the guatemalan-campesino-highland-roast, iced devanjari java, etc.--ridiculous.
so I bagged the PC blends, and just say ...large house coffee, that is, the once per annum when one has to deal with Starbux guppies...or the street freaks hustling 'em. Sort of unhealthy, at least LA-side. There was a few years ago some fairly intense chess action in a few valley S-bux. But that's ended. Now just geeks and business types clicking away on the pinche apples, with the smooth "jazz", tho' at times a few desperate WASP housewives...generally more trouble than they're worth.
I think "Do you want butter or cheese?" is the most efficient response the barista could possibly make to Rosenthal's order.
ReplyDeleteRosenthal assumes the barista knows that Rosenthal knows that butter and cheese are available, so that by not asking for one or both of them, Rosenthal is indicating that she does not want either of them. But the barista does not know what Rosenthal knows and so abbreviates the completely unobjectionable "The bagel is available with butter and/or cheese; would you like one or both?" in the simple "Do you want butter or cheese?" What Rosenthal is objecting to is the barista's offering information that Rosenthal already has, but that only violates "be brief" if the barista has reason to believe the information is unnecessary, which we have no reason to believe is the case. Thus, the purist's response should be "I am at this moment aware that those condiments are offered, and my order stands" which in context can be phrased more efficiently as "Neither."
Note that it is of no interest to the barista whether Rosenthal knew beforehand that the condiments were available, so it would be otiose for Rosenthal to tell her so. All the barista needs to know is that Rosenthal now knows what condiments are available and has not asked for one or both.
The second time the same barista encounters Rosenthal, the barista would have reason to believe from their prior encounter that Rosenthal knows what condiments are available and would ask for them if she wanted them. But even then, "Do you want butter or cheese?" could be used to mean "As a courtesy, I am reminding you that butter and cheese are available. Does that change your order?" Again, this is perfectly decent thing to say, which means that the shorthand version is also decent, and brief to boot.