Coffee Pot vs. Coffee Maker

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jared from Richmond, Virginia.

Hey, Jared, welcome to the show.

What’s going on?

I had a recent discussion with some co-workers. We were cleaning out our water cooler that got some algae in it, and as we were cleaning it out, yeah, it’s pretty disgusting. Whether or not you can believe it, so don’t look in it.

Okay.

But we were cleaning out the water cooler, and the one coworker, Jesse, suggested we should clean it with vinegar like we would a coffee pot. And my other coworker, Mike, he was kind of confused by this. And I was like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. And he was still kind of looking at me weird. And he said, why wouldn’t you just clean the coffee pot with soap and water? And I said, oh, I get what you mean. She’s talking about the insides, the reservoir, the tubes, et cetera. And he said, do you mean the coffee maker? And I said, yeah, the coffee pot. And so we started kind of laughing about it and discussing it. And so I decided I’d send an email out to everyone in my unit. And I sent a picture of the appliance, said, what do you call this? And so we got the responses, and it was about 50-50. Some people said coffee maker. Others said coffee pot. And was just wondering what is correct or, you know, what is accepted and are there regional variations?

I’m pretty sure there’s no regional variation on this. What’s happening here is a linguistic phenomenon known as synecdoche, where this is where a part of something or a material that something is made of can stand in for the whole and can just represent the whole thing. And it’s further confused by the fact that we have a wide variety of coffee making devices. And some of them don’t look anything like a pot, but some of them look very much like a pot. Have you ever seen these big urns that you might make a gallon of coffee for a big conference? That’s very much a coffee pot and a coffee maker. So both terms perfectly apply there. But it’s a different kind of pot. And my question, just to stir the muck a little bit, for those of you who think that the glass vessel is the only thing that’s the coffee pot is, what part of that says pot to you? Because it’s made out of glass. And pots are not usually made out of glass.

Oh, no. No, no. I don’t know if I can say that. No, that’s not completely true. There are plenty of small pots, like you might have a honeypot made out of ceramic. Well, Jared, here’s my question. You talked about regional differences, but I’m wondering if there’s a generational difference.

Interesting. Okay. Do you find that? The reason I ask is because when I was very young, my parents had a coffee pot, and it was the kind that you just plug into the wall, and you poured out of that very pot, and there was a little glass thing on the top and the coffee would brew and, you know, you would hear it go like that. And then.

Oh, the percolators.

Yeah, yeah. I love the percolators.

Right. I love watching them. And I thought of that as a coffee pot. And then I remember when Mr. Coffee was introduced in the early 1970s. And it was like, oh, my gosh, this whole machine. And so I think I called it the coffee maker and the glass thing was the pot. Interesting. Wow. But it was a change in the way that I was looking at coffee. You know, a better linguistic term for this probably is metonymy, which is where you might say something like all hands on deck. It’s not that your ship is only staffed by wriggling hands. It’s actually people attach those hands, but you call them hands anyway. Or boots on the ground in the military, right? That refers to soldiers, not actual pairs of leather boots running around by themselves. And so in this case, the coffee pot can do that. We do this all the time in English. Wall Street stands for the whole financial industry. Hollywood. Hollywood is a neighborhood, but it’s also an industry.

So I think Jared’s question is, which group is right? Is that your question, Jared?

Well, yeah. I was just wondering if one is more correct than the other, if one is a preferred term. I think there was some confusion that by using coffee pot when you meant coffee maker introduced confusion into communication. You know, you’ve listened to the show enough. I’m ambivalent. I’m not willing to come down on either side for this. I think they both work. What happens in human communication is we constantly are unclear, and in the next breath, we add clarity. Either we’re asked for it or we realize we need to clarify. It sounds like that’s what’s happened here, and you guys have just strung out this search for clarity beyond all reasonable bounds, to be honest. You have clarity. You now know what was meant. You now know what was meant. There’s nothing more really to gain from this. And you still have algae in your water cooler.

We still have algae in there. You know, I would shake my head every time we pick that up. Put some goldfish in there. Or snails. There might be some.

We’re going to go. Take care, Jared.

Thanks, Jared.

All right. Thank you, guys.

Bye-bye.

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