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.
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