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[arethinn]

Feeling oddly magical today. Left some decorated glamour-stones at East-West Books in downtown Mountain View while vainly searching for a 2003 calendar (which I finally got across the street at Book Buyers or whatever it's called): one on a high bookshelf in front of a copy of Good Faeries, Bad Faeries (hope it doesn't hit whoever knocks it down), one in the big fountain at the back of the store, a few others inside boxes and pouches and things. Chatted briefly with panhandler smoking outside of Books Inc, asked his name (A.J.), he started to tell me all kinds of things about how some friends had gotten him a cell phone (??) and he had a broken-down stationwagon parked at an Albertsons and stuff; told me I was a beautiful lady as I walked away, which was the second time in two days that someone fairly random (as opposed to someone with whom I was purposely flirting, having a discussion about appearances, etc) has said such a thing. Found a magnolia blossom fallen off the neighbour's tree, took a petal from it, and picked some other random things to go inside it as I walked back from Starbucks (nonmagical, ewww ^_^).

Speaking of Starbucks, "grande nonfat iced vanilla latte" is way too many syllables to have to speak just to order coffee. And another thing: the names for sizes are stupid. They used to be "short", "tall" and "grande". But apparently, they were not satisfied with having silly words rather than "small", "medium" and "large", because at some point (at least a few years ago, I expect) they changed them to "tall", "grande" and "venti", thus going on to commit the ridiculosity of having no size called "small", like some fast food places and their french fries. Nothing is small, there's only big, bigger and biggest! feh.

Comments

[ihlathi.livejournal.com]

I work at a cafe in Quebec, and I can always tell when an American comes in - they order grande lattes, pronouncing it grand-ay. :)

[starlightforest.livejournal.com]

I would say it gron-day, pronouncing it like Spanish, since well, we have a lot of that sort of thing out here in the (essentially) southwest... I imagine that if I ever went to Quebec I would take pains to overcorrect my pronunciation, and probably wind up sounding just as silly. :)

[arianadii.livejournal.com]

They do actually still have "short" as a size. It just isn't on the menu for some reason.

The sizes are short, tall, grande, and vente which makes a vente the equivalent of an extra-large and that does make sense language wise.

I am guessing that Starbuck's plan to take over the world includes using the same size menus everywhere and this is an attempt to keep it uniform. ;)