Manners maketh man

I wrote a blog post some months ago about frequently misused phrases that I notice creeping into English usage in the UK. I thought I'd revisit this in a slightly different way and point out my annoyance at a couple of phrases that seem to have arrived over the past two years or so (or at least that's when I've noticed them).

1. "Can I get a ....". This one's arisen for people who are ordering a round of drinks, or food at a restaurant. The customer now asks "Can I get a pint of San Miguel" rather than saying "Can I have...", "I'd like..." or better "May I have...".

What's the effect of this? Well, I see it as part of the removal of manners from our everyday social transactions. Each time you say to a bartender "Can I get a...", you're fundamentally bypassing their involvement as the person who's responsible for serving you. Using the word 'get' implies to me that the customer is going to walk around the bar and serve himself a drink, as if to say "your service is rubbish and I don't feel like you're doing anything to make my experience in this pub more pleasant". I think that this reduction of etiquette may subliminally reduce the politeness between the two partners to the transaction, resulting in everyone feeling a little less satisfied at the manners contained within the exchange (and therefore the sense of mututal respect between the customer and the employee). Think about this next time you're about to use the word 'get' in that situation, and think about whether you've actually always said 'get', or whether, like me, your ears have picked this up as a new development in language usage.

2. "I want you to give me 110%". I'm absolutely fed up of hearing idiots on television saying this. Whether it's some kind of fitness trainer, or some obnoxious chef, there always seems to be someone demanding one hundred and *ten* per cent of the people under them. I'm interested in this on two levels. Firstly, who taught these people maths? When you're talking about human capacity there is a finite limit of ability to do something. That's called one hundred per cent effort. Anything more than one hundred per cent would therefore have to be the work of more than one person. Try telling that to the logic masters we watch nightly on our TVs. They're always saying that the person needs to make more effort, and the cliche figure they put on this is always "110%". So, the second thing that intrigues me is where this figure of 110% came from. Seeing as the demands are impossible to meet (remember, we have a maximum capacity of 100% here), why not just ask for two hundred or three hundred per cent. Those figures are no less absurd, when you look at it in these terms. But somewhere along the line, some exaggerator decided that 110% was a suitable figure.

People are daft.