One of our correspondents returned from a coffee house recently where three jugs of milk were labelled separately, and as follows:
Semi-skimmed, skimmed, full fat.
I don’t think it would offend anyone to say that words are not the strong suit of the cheaper eateries, be they work-based canteens or greasy spoons. Usually, speedy service is king, and logically so – spelling mistakes may cost you the odd pedant in custom, but slow food is a cardinal sin. (The notion that this does not exist in America is false; another correspondent attempted to secure a Burger King at JFK, and was left in a queue for nearly half an hour while the attendants stopped mid-order to discuss their holidays – not ones they had taken, but simply the idea of not being at work. Still, service, overall, is better – as you tip for it this is no surprise, but it seems to be more amenable to the national nature.) Bad words are not brilliant but, as long as the customer understands what is being offered, no real harm is done. For the idler, it may even be part of the charm.
Such crimes are usually reserved for the coffee machine, ‘expresso’ being a particular favourite, jarring enough when vocalised to set one’s teeth on edge. Would Italians be irritated? I imagine it depends on the Italian, but this classification of the milk implies something sinister; aside from being arranged out of any discernibly helpful order, the term ‘full fat’ is out of kilter with the other two, and carries a pejorative weight. Why not simply ‘unskimmed’? Once upon a time, Britain was a land without such dairy variety. Perhaps we should revert to percentages as the North Americans use, so much more descriptive – or simply start putting the number of calories on everything we serve in restaurants.
If this was law, it might take some of the romance out a menu. And imagine the scope for the numerical spelling mistakes – if a customer falsely believed that a full English breakfast was 45 calories and one day woke up too fat to leave the house, would he or she have a case for suing the eaterie that misinformed them? It’s a sidestep from the tobacco question, and not impossible to imagine.
News hour, with Jerry Caesar 