July 14, 2004
Medium is Large is Venti
I am confused. While ordering a burger at Burger King
seems
simple, it raises a few questions, mainly of a linguistic matter. You
see, the meals that Bk sells come in
different sizes. Three sizes, to be exact: “Medium”, “Large” and - I
believe it’s called - “King Size”. To a degree, this nomenclature is
self-explanatory. It signifies a progressing size of
food. If you are hungry, you order a medium whopper meal, if you are
starving, you get a large. With the exception of the expression “King
Size”, which is a BK generated term to signify the ultimate amount in
drink and fries, all words have their origin in a vernacular that
pertains to the concepts of size and amount per se. For consumers, this
has the advantage of simplifying the size selection process because they
are well acquainted with meanings of those terms.
It gets confusing, however, when you leave the realm of comparative meaning and look at the explicits of “medium”. “Medium” suggests that the object to which this attribute pertains is the number two in a certain order of a common characteristic. It is - literally speaking - in the middle. Now, in the order of meal sizes at BK, medium is the smallest. There is nothing under “medium”. If you want a measly little portion of fries and drink, you’re stuck with odering a “medium”. “Medium” has been hijacked by commercialism; it has been downgraded. In the Burger King context of things, it loses its status as a simple word for everyday consumers. It has become “Mediumtm”. Talk about confusing.
The staff at BK are apparently well trained to deal with helpless
customers like myself. When I ordered a “small” Whopper meal the other
day, I got - in effect - a “medium”. Interesting. The context automatically
shifts to some sort of “Plan-B”, which is, “the customer wants a small
meal. Let’s give him/her the smallest that we have.”
And that happens
to be called “medium”. Be that as counterintuitive as it may, It works perfectly.
You can understand why I get nervous when I order coffee at Starbucks. Not only does the coffee seller offer a mind-boggling variety of brews, they have also chosen to introduce a different nomenclature altogether. To complicate the process, some words in Italian have been thrown into the mix. I believe a large coffee is called “Venti”. It is then when I pretend I speak only German. I just point. It’s foolproof.
Posted by Chefredaktion at July 14, 2004 1:48 PM