Tall please!

So not too long ago, I walked into a coffee shop in Balitmore called Red Emma’s.

Named after Emma Goldman, an anarchist and political activist, who died in 1940, the basement shop doubles as a bookstore for feminist, African American, anti-establishment and queer literature. Food and drink offerings include fair trade coffee and vegan and vegetarian food.

The dreadlocked clerk asked me what I’d like.

“Tall, please.”

Silence. An eyebrow lifted. A dreadlocked twitched.

“Tall?” the clerk finally repeated, then paused to offer me a chance to redeem myself in the eyes of Red Emma, who if she were watching from beyond the grave (not likely since she was an atheist, but we’ll gloss over that here), was no doubt deeply dissappointed.

“We have small, medium and large,” the clerk said.

Point taken. I’m Starbucks’ whore.

My shameful suceptability to brianwashing aside, the more I think about the acceptance of “tall,” “grande,” and “venti” into common parlance, the more it seems a rich vein of semantic slippage.

There’s a lot going on here; the use of “tall” to describe the smallest unit a company offers; the power of distribution - that Starbucks is so widespread that it can change how we use language; a term that once was hip, known only to the in crowd, is now passé, distained by the vanguard as establishment rhetoric.

The irony, for me, is that I don’t even like Starbuck’s. I like coffee, Starbuck’s are everywhere, 7-Eleven coffee sucks, so I end up ordering “talls.” (I’ve asked for a “small” at a Starbucks before, and gotten the same reaction I elicited at Red Emma’s.)

Viewed from Starbucks perspective, its easy to see why they call a small a “tall.” I feel good about buying a tall - even though a small cup at 7-11 costs less. Tall is big; I get my money’s worth. A grande, well, that must be huge! What value! Venti’s must come with a Hummer.

It was cool for a while. Starbucks cherrypicked hip urban locations to open stores, lending their product a chic, hard-to-get feel. (Hip Baltimorean’s long bemoaned the company’s reluctance to grace Charm City with an outlet.)

Then Starbucks grew from 1,000 to 13,000 stores in 10 years. Millions of us learned to say “tall” for small just as the Seattle coffee juggernaut left the temple of cool to set up shop next to Applebee’s and McDonalds.

In my case, the oddest aspect of my encounter at Red Emma’s wasn’t that I’d come to associate the word “tall” with a small coffee. It was that I actually wanted a large coffee. I retained the original meaning of the word: tall=big.

I wonder what the clerk thought I meant. Despite his distaste for my discourse, I’m sure he knew what a Starbucks tall looks like. Did he think I wanted the smallest size Emma’s offers, which would have been the meaning in the context of a Starbucks store? Or did I want a coffee of the same volume as a Starbucks tall? Or did I want the largest coffee cup he offered, the connotation if I was using the original meaning of the word “tall”…big.

If he had an inkling, he didn’t show it. He rejected my “signifier,” the term for words and other signs in semiotics parlance, as inadaquate for him to place the “signified,” the entity to which I was attempting to refer. Either he was truely confused, or my odiously out-dated lingo offended his hipster sensibilites, or both.

(A related note: the term passé, in addition to meaning out-dated, is also used in fencing to describe an attack that passes the target without hitting. A nice metaphor for my original order.)

This exchange wasn’t just about the meaning of words. It also involved another type of discourse: personal identity. The clerk and I were negotiating how we define ourselves in the context of our culture.

I emerged as the yuppy professional, short haired and necktie bound, too caught up in job, family and career to get ahead of the cultural zeitgiest. He was leading the charge into the new and vital. He cared about poor South American coffee farmers, and so worked for a cafe that sells only fair trade coffee. I stole food from those farmers’ hungry children by supporting corporate America.

“Oh, yeah,” I said, with an embarrassed chuckle. “Large please.”

He silently went to the pot and poured me a tall…I mean…big, cup of coffee.

It was hot and I thought about asking for one of those sleeves that slip around the cup to insulate it. Images of bulldozers pushing down Amazonian rainforest trees flashed in my mind. So I let it go.