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Showing posts from March, 2008

Fritalian Spoken Here

This Dunkin' Donuts spot kinda confuses me. Are they making fun of people who have a phobia of foreign languages? (a.k.a. "Americans") Are they making fun of people who are too stupid to remember the way they order their coffee? Starbucks has four sizes: Short, Tall, Grande and Venti. Of these, only 'venti' seems to pose a problem. Surely even the slowest consumer-bot can parse the difference between Short and Tall, and might even be able to remember that 'grande' is bigger than those two. So 'venti' seems to be causing linguistic agony, curiously, amongst a population of sheep that seems to have no problem with words like 'hizzy' and concepts like pinching their iPod. As for the names of the drinks themselves, they derive from the original Italian, from whence hails the espresso that is the basis of a good premium coffee drink. And for the onomatopoeically inclined, that's not 'expresso'. But talk about missing the p...