A Flat White By Any Other Name

You’ve been in a conversation about the difference between a latte and a flat white. Everyone has. I believe it to be the single most contentious topic not only in the coffee realm, but in the world at large. Global leaders lose sleep at the thought that this question may appear in a parliamentary debate. UN peacekeepers have been training for ensuing riots.

 

So what is the difference? Ha! As if I’d open myself up to the trolls and keyboard warriors and make a statement like that. No, I’m a scaredy cat at heart and I fear the few who would flex their thumb muscles and throw angry word punches in my direction. 

 

Instead I’ll just give you some musings on language and names and history, and how we all have different ideas and theories because we all have different backgrounds. And I have the internet on my side so will provide you with unbiased, objective, unexaggerated truths derived from opinions on the world wide web.

 

Delving into why this coffee is called this, and why that coffee is called that, reminds me of my first communications lecture at uni. The question was posed, “why is a tree called a tree?” Why not a ‘dog’ or ‘blue’ or ‘blumblegrib’? When you write the word ‘tree’, it isn’t a recipe whereby you assemble the letters e, r, and t in a particular way, process them, and from this a physical tree appears. Like a magical alphabet soup. Rather, the letters e, r, and t, arranged as t,r,e,e are a symbol of that physical entity, that formed over time, spread through the population and collectively accepted into the vernacular. Likewise, the letters themselves are not the sounds themselves, rather a symbol representing the sound that over time was collectively accepted into the alphabet. 

 

And how are things named? Elementary, my dear Watson. Well, not quite. The first nouns evolved from a formation of sounds as human’s capacity to speak evolved. After a foundation of collectively understood sounds or ‘words’ as we might now call them, these words and sounds that symbolised objects or verbs and the like were adapted, mixed, calculated like a calculus equation, to name the new thing, and to describe the new thing, using the already established and widely understood symbols.

 

You see the point I’m making? Clear as mud. 

 

Collectively accepted. Widely understood. A collective could mean two people. And how wide is a piece of red tape? Our language exists in a much smaller sphere than we might appreciate. You may have beed out of town when the collective accepted it. You may have stood slightly wider than what was widely understood. Language and meaning is riddled with holes, and fraught with misunderstanding. Cockey and Roadman slang are derived from English, but I’d struggle to follow a conversation in either. But you know who wouldn’t? Cocknies and Roadmen. The language evolved to service the community, to shorten the space between thinking the thing and realising the thing. Creating a sense of group identity from using a form of the language only known to the insiders.

 

Now you see the point I’m making? The definition of the thing is decided by the people you are communicating with about the thing. And even then it’s subjective.

 

So what is a flat white? And what is a latte? It’s whatever the cafe you’re ordering from has decided it is. And what if their definition is different than your definition? It probably is. Firstly, is it delicious, regardless of its name? It probably is. Secondly, if it’s delicious, who cares what its called? You’ve made sounds (or gestures) at a person, who knew the sounds (or gestures) you made represented both nouns, verbs and imperatives, exchanged currency (yet another collectively accepted symbol), then they brought your desires into being, and gave it to you.

 

With all the shared semiotics required to achieve such a feat, it’s amazing you got anything at all. Let alone a coffee. Let alone a flat white. Or so you think.

 

So if next time you’re in such a conversation, and you don’t think they’re as down for communication studies lecture as you are, just give them a quick and well known quote from Shakespeare – “a flat white by any other name would taste as sweet.”

 

The Bard knows his coffee.