The youth in front of me in Starbucks said: ‘Can I get a tall skinny latte and a blueberry muffin?’ The girl behind the counter said: ‘No problem.’
A sign that the language has changed is when foreign phrase books give sentences that it would never occur to me to use. It has gone past that now. An advertisement that Veronica showed me on the internet offers T-shirts with the words: ‘Quieres tomar un café?’ The English-language website explains that this means: ‘Do you want to get a coffee?’ It is not that I think ‘Can I get?’ is particularly rude. It’s just that it does not convey the thought I have when I want to buy a cup of coffee.
The ‘No problem’ response is more complicated. Most of the young people who work in cafés in London come from abroad. Many of them are used to having, in their own language, a word that answers an interlocutor’s ‘Thank you’. In Italian it is prego, in Spanish de nada, in German bitte schön. What it is in Ukrainian I do not know, but Ukrainians do.
Some phrase books suggest, as an English version, ‘Don’t mention it’, but, although we often say ‘Thank you’, as when accepting change for our payment, we do not expect anyone then to answer, ‘Don’t mention it’. That phrase might be kept for more onerous services, as might ‘Not at all’, or even ‘It’s the least I could do’. If the checkout girl said, ‘It’s the least I could do’, when being thanked for the change, we might be tempted to agree with her.
The truth is that there is what linguists unpleasantly call a ‘zero realisation’ in English of the semantic item represented by prego. We say nothing. But immigrants want to say something, lest they be thought rude. So they say, ‘No worries’, or, ‘No problem’, when serving in restaurants or gentlemen’s clubs (my husband says). The phrases have an air of the antipodean back-pack.
The difficulty applies the other way round too. English-speakers are keen to say please politely in other languages, even if those languages do not express politeness by constantly saying please. So English tourists say ‘por favor’ to waiters and barmen in a way that sounds too insistent to a Spaniard. It is as if someone were to say: ‘A glass of wine, if you please, my good man.’ If you want the butter passed in Spanish, you say, ‘Pass the butter.’ To add por favor can smack of impatience.
Thank you.
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