There’s something quietly absurd about the way certain brands go about naming everyday things. The coffee industry’s infamous sizing system—where “tall” means small and “venti” feels like you’re ordering in an opera—has become a kind of inside joke people are too exhausted to laugh at.

It’s packaging pretension as sophistication. And maybe they think it’s clever, but really it’s just putting lipstick on a cup of brown liquid we all rely on to survive the morning.

This chalkboard sign flips the whole performance on its head. It’s blunt. A touch cheeky. More honest than most corporate branding departments dare to be. “Flat white = white coffee.” Simple. There’s no drama. No Italian vocabulary test before you’ve had your caffeine. It’s the antidote to the nonsense. What some call elegance, others might call marketing theatre.

There’s a kind of strange irony in naming a plain old milk-heavy coffee a “latte” just to sound continental. Especially when the language it’s borrowed from has been making coffee for centuries without a global branding workshop.

The names weren’t invented to dazzle—they just described what was in the cup. But at some point someone realised that throwing in a foreign word makes things feel more ‘premium’. So now we have drinks with names longer than the small talk at the counter.

And it’s not just coffee. You’ll see it with things like “artisanal hydration” (bottled water) or “curated grazing boards” (cheese and crackers). It’s theatre dressed as logic, a kind of self-aware silliness that thinks it’s clever—but really, it’s just noise.

If you strip it all back, people just want good stuff, served with clarity and a bit of charm. Not a lesson in nomenclature.

This café blackboard proves you can poke fun at the whole act and still serve a decent brew.

Maybe that’s what we need a bit more of—less drama, more coffee.

#coffeeclarity #namingnonsense #marketinggimmicks #brandpretence #simpleisbetter #espressohonesty #caféculturestripped