Double Shot Buzz: Gaylord's Caffe Espresso / Vowels, Consonants, and Dithonomics

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Back Buzz - January 28, 2003

Gaylord's Caffe Espresso, 4150 Piedmont Avenue, Berkeley, CA, USA

Since I wasn't able to see in the year 2003 from my Yorkshire home I decided to spend the holiday with my Bay Area friend in Oakland. Mistah Rick and I started our New Year's Eve off with breakfast at Gaylord's. As we walked to the coffeehouse we enjoyed the brilliant autumn foliage along Piedmont Avenue. (Yes, I know: autumn on December 31? Only in California...)

Although the popular Gaylord's was crowded on this cool morning we found two available tables inside. We decided to forego a game on the vintage PacMan table and sit at the more traditional table after ordering cappuccinos and bagels with cream cheese. Unfortunately I'd forgotten I was in California, and the "double cappuccino" I ordered turned out to be two full cappuccinos in one large cup. Yes, in this state you must never order a "double cappuccino" unless you want a huge milky drink. The correct term is a "single cappuccino with an extra shot". Actually it's pretty much the same situation in England -- I guess I've become used to ordering the much less confusing "double macchiato" which can't be confused with anything other than two shots of espresso with a little milk foam. (Fortunately the Starbucks caramel macchiato travesty has yet to reach Britain.)

Gaylord's features nice art on the walls, and on this festive morning jazz was emanating from the stereo. I think the coffee in my drink may have been quite tasty, although it was difficult to detect through the gallons of foamy milk in my bathtub of a cup. There was plenty of room for a nice rosetta on top, though. The bagels were huge as well but quite airy, not bad toasted with cream cheese. And the airiness makes them less filling, enabling me to fit an entire bagel in my stomach along with the gallon of milk in my cappuccino.

As we left Mistah Rick noticed a sign asking customers to please bus their own table. But how does one find out where their table would like to go, if it wants to go anywhere at all? Or do they mean to buss your own table? But what if you buss another table you find more attractive? Will this create a scene? Is Gaylord's a hotbed of table lovers' quarrels and spats? And after hours, do they feature table dancers?

Such potential misunderstandings a single letter might cause brings to mind the linguistic culture shock I've suffered since I returned to California, especially in regard to vowels vs consonants. The Brits tend to attach more importance to their consonants than the Americans, especially in Yorkshire where vowels are less stressed than in Southern England. The further north you travel in Britain the rarer the vowels tend to become, especially when you get into the Highlands of Scotland where they're all but nonexistent. In fact I imagine the Shetland Islands to the far north as being under absolute consonantal rule with only the occasional schwa uprising which is quickly squelched by a decree of guttural tongue-rollings.

In stark contrast, the consonant seems to be vanishing in the state of California. When I left California 13 years ago I'm sure the natives still called themselves "Ca-li-for-nians". Now they call themselves "Ali-or-nhias". And the common salutation in shops seems to be "Ah-oo, a-a-ithe-ay!" which I've finally figured out means "Thank you, have a nice day". (See? That linguistics class I took in university finally paid off...)

But this alphabetical takeover has gone too far, as evidenced by the following recent trans-Atlantic e-mail discussion:

The other day, while I was visiting my friend Marymary in Los Alamitos, the new Verizon Phone Directory arrived. In browsing through it we noticed some very mysterious numbers at the very beginning of the White Pages. The 19th listing is for "A AAA Coast Appliance Repair Inc." in "LB" (Long Beach). But here are the first 18 listings:

A.......................................921-6892
A LB...................................997-7995
A Covina.............................626 966-7717
A LB...................................437-5576
A LB...................................435-0770
A.......................................433-4368
A LB...................................436-8483
A LB...................................436-8483
A LB...................................437-5576
A LB...................................435-0770
A LongBeach.......................800 404-1200
A Covina.............................626 966-7717
A.......................................433-4368
A LB...................................436-8483
A SlBch...............................430-7832
A.......................................596-5767
A 280 Atlantic Av LB.............432-6441
A 4338 Katella Ave LsAlmts...594-4431

I'm so curious to phone these numbers! I'd like to know just who "A" is and what "A" does. I'd like to dial 921-6892 and say, "Hello, I'd like to buy a vowel..." Given that the Chicago Board of Trade allows trading in vowels and consonants, then the Options market in accents is certain to follow which will give rise to the Big Pharmaceutical Companies deriving patents for artificial vowels followed by the illegal trade in schwa clones shipped in to the country from those countries who have a surplus of unused umlauts and declensions. The federal legislators seeing the opportunity for additional revenues will, of course, tax the aboveground market as possible; but moving such commodities in plain brown envelopes hampers their effectiveness leading to source discovery and ID tagging with drool tags. These tags will have to come from the Indo-European GeVowel Project Inventory until these, too, are compromised by maverick Scrabble hackers, leading to market and social chaos even as we know it.. Does this have anything to do with the sudden global discovery of the cheap bottles of Charles Shaw Merlot at Trader Joe's that my mother and I have been drinking? Not only did the $1.99 bottles of highly drinkable wine make it to the front page of the Los Angeles Times, but Drewline said there was a similar article in the London Times. My mother and I are now afraid the supply will rapidly disappear.

Could this possibly have occurred because of a misprint where "Charles Shaw" was written "Charles Schwa"? I laughed out loud at Unkletom's mail. Tell him from me that I would have thought a man of his experience would know that the place to put your money is conjugation. I am discovering that I have really been ignoring the first few pages of the phone books after all this time. Your visit coincided with this discovery and I am sure the two events are related.

DATE: DECEMBER 26, 2002
TO: DREWLINE
FROM: UNKLETOM

Re Conjugation in the "Convowelic" Market Theory:

It's widely suspected by the best theorists that the Keynesian liquidity transfer force may be in if not subtle then less than obvious operation. A paper in the Journal of Metaphysical Economics by Dr. W. A. Sted proposes that the average user of vowels and consonants has a hidden desire to prolong the Reichian primal feeling of randomly combining same until certain nerve centers release optimal orgone hormones. Further application and investigation of these phenomena may finally explain the affliction of yodelling and scat singing so indicative of cultural and social decadence. Alas, the obvious needless oversupplies of vowels in Alpine valleys and Hawaiian front porches must be due to such hormonal imbalances, perhaps due to diet or genetically derived responses to environmental pressures such as green Lager. This is obviously an open field for further meaningful research!

DATE: December 28, 2002 9:36 am
TO: UNKLETOM
FROM: DREWLINE

I greatly appreciated your erudite input to our dilemma. I was forced to conclude, after substantial reference, that it must be pure coincidence that precisely the same movements are demonstrably observed in the directly proportional 'conbowel market.' That must be why most of this essential science is discussed by after-dinner speakers. We should both beware, though, because I've heard of a punsterplot to take over the entire metaphysical vocabulary, rendering our subject's components redundant.