It’s no shock that I can’t get myself out of bed without the promise of my tepid caffeine injection. Apparently, as Hans Werner mentions in his March 2005 Toronto Star review of The Coffee House: A Cultural History, “[Caffeine] beats out nicotine and alcohol as the most widely used drug on the planet, so maybe it’s not surprising that the value of coffee traded on the international market is second only to oil.”
So, it’s true that I’m one addict among many. But, in contrast to more ostracized indulgences, this vice is not only socially sanctioned, but in fact celebrated.
In an article for Language in Society, “Coffeetalk: StarbucksTM and the commercialization of casual conversation,” Ralph Gaudio makes a rather dated reference to Good Will Hunting’s overture to Skylar to “get together and eat a bunch of caramels” instead of “going for coffee.” Indeed, Will’s joke is at the expense of our language which has created an institution of “going for coffee”- in reality, an arbitrary affair.
The conversations that take place in such settings are what many North Americans would characterize as casual, ordinary, or even natural. But Gaudio argues they are “neither inherently nor naturally so,” and that the way in which we “organize our schedules to combine casual conversation with the consumption of food and drink in a commercial retail space are by no means natural or universal.”
To be sure, the big players of the caffeine trade work their hardest to cement coffee in our routines and language. One company particularly guilty of this is Starbucks, which has lassoed the verbal associations related to the coffee outing, and rustled them into submission through an absolutist imposition of slang.
Starbucks’ slang is distinctive for its overrepresentation of foreign loanwords such as grande and venti, and its militant affirmation of said jargon. How often have you tried to order a “medium” at a Starbucks, only to be chastized into using their heavily-caffeinated NewSpeak of grande?
So, while engaging in the supposedly casual social interaction of “coffee,” even the way we express our thoughts is controlled by the corporate environment. While Starbucks attempts to create every semblance of a laid-back and bohemian space, it is in fact infecting its customers’ mental processes. But such is the irony of a juggernaut corporation who prints customer quotes (“The Way I See It”) on its cups. We should not believe that they care what we “see,” if it is anything other than a steaming cup of eighty-dollar Chantico.
Contrast this with the comparatively earnest Tim Horton’s. There, a “regular” is sugar and cream, and you don’t have to accede to the tyrannous title of the “double-double” if you want two parts of the same. At Timmy Ho’s you can order coffee the way you actually talk. Nevertheless, one has to wonder how much of this proletarian parlance is contrived-a calculated response to the affected pretentiousness of Starbucks. But either way, Timmy’s is really more of a donut shop than one of the ever-spawning empire of frou-frou coffee nooks.
Consider the sociolinguistic principle which argues that the creation of a specific subculture language requires dedication and connection to an activity. Chillingly, as I have argued, the language that perpetuates the coffee culture is the one imposed by dominant corporations like Starbucks. It is not the customer who has the last laugh in the supposedly carefree coffee break: it is the corporation putting coffee, and words, in our mouths.
