Unmitigated Cunliffe

Relaxing in the corporate-affiliated café of a chain bookstore, having lined up with people ordering 24-ounce ventis.

I'm here browsing more Barry Cunliffe, whose book Britain Begins continues to offer a stimulating, plausible account of the peopling of Great Britain. Among the results of the population movements are those great Neolithic monuments I love to visit. (Call me old-fashioned, but part of me feels the world has been going straight to hell since the onset of the Bronze Age.) A summary chronology: Barrows came first, then passage graves, then the circular "henges," one of which you might know. Historical context only enhances the monuments' power to inspire awe. I now half-expect to visit examples in the Orkneys for next year's pre- or post-Crimefest trip.

Cunliffe also redeems himself for his earlier misuse of mitigate with this entertaining passage:

"The basis of subsistence was now much broader and much more reassuring than in past times, when survival depended on unmitigated reindeer eked out by horse meat."

I don't know about you, but I find unmitigated reindeer beguiling, not least for the images it conjures of Neolithic children complaining: "Reindeer again? This stuff sucks!" Cunliffe's correct use of eke out is a bonus.

All is forgiven, professor.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

If 20 was 24, plus a question about linguistic hucksterism

I had a post lined up about Hugo Hamilton's affecting 1997 Dublin crime novel Headbanger and another on Max Allan Collins' Quarry in the Middle, which forced me to re-examine what I look for and enjoy in a crime novel.

Then I dropped into a local Starbucks and found that its venti (the Italian word for twenty) drinks now contain twenty-four ounces. The same Starbucks has added a trenta, which, naturally, contains thirty-one ounces even though trenta is the Italian word for thirty. 

This means I can no longer simply ask for a small, medium, or large rather than the Starbucks equivalents of tall, grande, and venti. (I got around the problem this time by ordering a 24-ounce drink and asking the counter clerk if the drink whose name means twenty really contains twenty-four ounces. Her reply? "Would you like whipped cream with that?”)

But this is a watershed in American fast-food retailing: The stuff-your-face supersize McDonalds mentality meets the semantic snobbery that has “baristas” mispronouncing doppio macchiato all over America. It is also not the first time Starbucks has altered a word's meaning for its own purposes.

What examples of semantic hucksterism language change drive you nuts?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Eric Hoffer's labor pains

Around the time Ronald Reagan broke the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization in 1981, I noticed that some service and blue-collar businesses began to call their workers “associates,” at least in public.

Much more recently, a Starbucks in Philadelphia posted a notice that it was looking for “partners.” Since I doubt that Starbucks was offering a financial stake and a voice in running the company, at the very least the company was indulging in creative redefinition of partner.

What would Eric Hoffer have thought of this verbal trickery, if he took the words seriously? Here's another bit from The Ordeal of Change:

“Any doctrine which preaches the oneness of management and labor—whether it stresses their unity in a party, class, race, nation, or even religion—can be used to turn the worker into a compliant instrument in the hands of management.”

© Peter Rozovsky 2012