Accidental Blogger

Coffee at Starbucks. It's advertised in three sizes. What wasn't obvious to me is that the sizes actually contain different concentrations of coffee. A tall (12 oz.) coffee has a shot of coffee, as does a grande (16 oz.), but the venti (20 oz.) coffee has two coffee-shots. So, depending on which size you get, you get volume-to-coffee ratios of 12 oz./shot, 16 oz./shot and 10 oz/shot.

Now of course there's nothing inherent in the taste of latte_medium that should make it best served in medium-sized portions. The form of the latte_small does not come equipped with an intrinsic volume-scale. In fact, you should be able to buy each of coffee_small, coffee_medium and coffee_large in sizes small, medium and large as desired. Think of it: you really like the especially mild and milky flavor of latte_medium, sufficiently in fact to to
want it in the large size. A ^largelatte_medium, so to speak. For when ^mediumlatte_medium just isn't enough. Or maybe the robust heartiness of ^largemocha_large is appealing, but who wants that much coffee? Is not the ^mediummocha_large a worthy alternative? Coffee is not a univariate entity – no, it is inherently a matrix-type proposition. It seems to me Starbucks underserves us by offering us only the diagonal coffee-elements, and compounds the error by identifying the elements, as if a latte_medium were merely a jumbo version of the latte_small.

I have great trouble convincing people of the essential awesomeness of the proposed scheme; somehow people – even those fluent in the half-syrup-half-caramel-one-percent-macchiato-with-cinnamon lingo – seem to find this a bit complicated. Me, I think a world with grid-valued coffee types, in which people had to think with 3×3 matrices every time they ordered a cuppa, would be a happier place in all of the best ways.