Your coffee, your way

Today we tackle coffee lovers’ worst nightmare: ordering your coffee when you’re abroad. It might seem a mere mundane matter, but don’t let appearances fool you. We all want our coffee our way. So how do you order a coffee in English?

First and foremost, you need to let the waiter /barista know you want a coffee. Here you have some suggestions:

• Can/Could I have a coffee, please?
• I’d like a coffee, please.
• Just a coffee, please.
• Hi, a coffee please.

If you simply ask for a coffee, the barista will probably start grilling you with quickfire questions about the coffee blend, size, temperature, milk, sugar, syrup, shots, extras… but fear not. Ordering your coffee will be smooth sailing thanks to our tips.

The Geek vs Nerd debate

One difficult thing about learning languages is translating. It may seem easy to translate everything when you’re a beginner, but at some point you start finding lots of terms with subtle shades of meaning and therefore without a straightforward correspondence. Why? Because language is culture, and culture doesn’t usually give names to unknown things in its surroundings – or not known yet.

So when people ask us: “How do you say ‘geek‘ /giːk/ in Spanish?“, the answer is “We don’t have a word for that“, so we: a) simply use the word ‘geek’; b) try to make up a fairly close synonym (maybe ‘friki‘ /ˈfrɪk.ɪ/?); or c) just explain what we’re talking about.

If you decide to employ ‘geek’ as it is, it doesn’t clear up the mystery of the meaning. If you go for the second option, the problem gets even bigger when you use that same Spanish synonym for another word in English: ‘nerd‘ /nɜːd/. So today we’ve decided to go for the third option and shed some light on the geek vs nerd debate. The following infographic by MastersInIt.org will give us a hand.