The mind boggles.
I have stood in many a supermarket line, but never, ever, has the customer in front of me ever tried to start a political discussion with the checkout girl.
Maybe I have just led a charmed life …
I really think they should change it to just PI, so you could say PI number without pedantic people trying to correct you
A “PI number” sounds like something a private investigator would have.
To me, a PI number sounds more like something totally irrational …
How about a 3.14159…number?
I think I have finally come up with the solution which will satisfy everybody (except anybody seeking a rational solution to PI …)
In future, when I come to the checkout, and the girl says “Put in your PIN number please”, I will grit my teeth and say nothing.
If she says “Put in your PIN”, however, I will say “Thank you for calling it a PIN, and not a PIN number, honey”.
Honor satisfied on all counts.
If the checkout person is male, will you still call him “honey”?
If anyone had said, or even implied, that “checkout girls belong to a subclass who can and should be left to wallow in ignorance,” you might have a point. But they didn’t, so you don’t.
The reason it’s rude to correct the “checkout girl” is that your relationship with that person is NOT an ongoing didactic or educational one. It is a transient commercial transaction, and if you manage to pay for your goods and leave the store without anything going wrong, then that’s all that is required of this particular interaction.
In fact, i would argue that it is considerably more elitist to spend your time correcting strangers—especially people in minimum-wage jobs who can’t respond to your rudeness by telling you to take a hike—on minor matters of grammar and usage. It makes you look like a self-important jackass and, in my opinion, people who do this generally are self-important jackasses.
I say all this as someone who believes very strongly in proper grammar and usage. I teach college, and am well known among my students for being quite demanding about grammar and usage in essays and other pieces of formal writing. My end-of-semester student evaluations often contain complaints that i am “harsh” in assessing my students’ writing.
But the requirements of formal writing are (or at least, should be) rather different from those of everyday casual conversation. There are many locutions that i would mark as problematic in a student paper, but that do not concern me at all in spoken exchanges. Conversations are often filled with short cuts, colloquialisms, redundancies, and all sorts of other informal types of speech, and even the most fastidious grammarian probably makes dozens of minor “errors” in his or her spoken communication every day.
I’ve heard it plenty, and have even seen it on signs, usually those advertising ATMs in smaller convenience stores. Like this and this.
In the supermarket which I favour with my custom, the male employees, IME, say “PIN”, they don’t say “PIN number”.
I did so hope that this discussion wouldn’t devolve into irrelevant sexist issues …
To be fair, most (but not all) of those were either late at night or very early in the morning at a convenience store, so there was more time for each transaction, and no one hustling them out of the way.
For most of them, they were in a store that was the only place within walking distance of a military hospital and a homeless shelter. So a lot of the customers just wanted an excuse to take a walk, and a lot of them were cut off from their regular social circle and wanted to talk. So I was more tolerant of that type of thing than I would normally have been.
Most of them were great guys. Most of the political ‘discussions’ were just venting. A few (split roughly evenly between hospital guys and locals) were really unpleasant, and were clearly an excuse to pretend my refusal to argue was someone agreeing with them.
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Being the only store open after 2am (this was a different store) leads to interesting transactions. Some bad (vague, hostile drunks) most just weird (a bus driver reading me the ‘dear John’ letter his girlfriend left him, then asking for input) and a few nice (a cute college chick wearing a Halloween costume that consisted of body paint, nipple rings, and a scarf around her hips)
I think it’s outright obnoxious to correct someone in this case. I mean if a checkout girl asked to see my PIN, I might be confused about what she wanted.
I say this sometimes. I know it’s redundant but it’s what I grew up hearing them called so it’s what my brain first thinks. If my brain/mouth filter is working I catch and correct it but it does slip through sometimes.
What? Who sez? Redundancy is a really common feature of language. I was trying to find the relevant section in Stephen Pinker’s Words and Rules, but I’m having trouble tracking my copy down,a nd using Google Books is too much work. Here’s a bit from Wikipedia instead:
In any case, I consider it an error to consider redundancy an error. It very often clarifies or emphasizes, both of which are perfectly cromulent linguistic goals.
The customer service worker in me says “this person doesn’t get paid enough to give a shit.”
Also…
NO.
I’m going to be polite and assume this thread is just a joke.
I’m starting to get an idea of what your schtick is (and the period goes inside the quotes).
People often point out that “ATM machine” is redundant. This is true, but then again, “ATM” is also redundant. It’s an automated teller… what, person? Of course it’s a machine; it’s automated. If you’re going to complain about redundancy, then you should just call it an AT.
Not in the UK.
Not necessarily. I could envision, for example, a teller machine that was operated remotely by an actual human being, rather than being able to automatically perform in response to customer input.
Also, even it that were the sort of redundancy you claim, it is quite different from the redundancy of ATM machine.
I used to get witnessed to, a LOT. People would come into our store, and ask everyone if they knew Jesus. I’d grit my teeth and lie. Then I pointed out to the manager that these people never BOUGHT anything, they just came in and wanted to convert us. And pass out pamplets. So I was given permission to ask what they were looking for, and if I didn’t get an answer like “I need a dress for a job interview”, I was allowed to point out that we were a business, not a church.
In the convenience store, I’d get guys asking me for dates, or just asking me how much money I’d want for various sex acts. A lot of the time, I was ringing up their purchases. It’s one thing to chat up a clerk and then ask for a phone number, if you’re not interfering with her duties. It’s another thing to harass a clerk about what time you should pick her up tonight, especially if she’s GOT to be at that register.
The general rule is, if the person you’re talking to isn’t really allowed to tell you to fuck off, in those words, then you don’t get to correct his/her grammar, and you don’t get to ask him/her out.