Things you hate people saying

Thanks for dropping by.

Barista is the Italian word for a bartender. It applies equally to the bartender in a joint that serves mostly alcohol plus the occasional coffee, and the bartender in a joint that serves mostly or exclusively coffee. If you order it at the counter and are served it over the counter, the person you are dealing with is a barista.

The word has been loaned into English because there is no satisfactory English word. Back in the day (see what I did there?) coffee shops were table service; you sat at a table, someone came and took your order, and then brought you whatever it was you ordered. That person was a waiter or waitress. With the introduction into the Anglosphere of the coffee bar, where you order and are served at the bar, there was a need for a new word. "Bartender", "barman" or "barmaid" didn't seem right, since in the Anglosphere there's a big difference between a pub and a coffee bar, so the Italian word was adopted. This was probably related to the fact that the first espresso bars were explicitly seen as an import from Italy, and were often run by Italians.

As I pointed out, in Strumm's (entirely plausible) example, the interviewer — a trained professional communicator, and the party in control of the conversation — also uses discourse markers. So why dump on the poor interviewee?

As I also pointed out, the use of discourse markers is almost universal, and it's a fairly safe bet that the people who comment critically on the use of discourse markers use them themselves (and are probably unaware that they do).

The discourse markers that we notice are the ones we don't use ourselves; the unfamiliar ones. Strumm gave his interviewer a discourse marker and never even noticed that he was doing so, because the marker concerned ("well") is an extremely common one, and (I'm guessing) probably one that Strumm himself uses. I never noticed the number of people using "well" as a discourse marker until I was struck by people using "so" or "ah, look" in a context where my idiom would use "well".

In this example the interviewee's discourse marker is a bit overblown, granted, but I'd put that down to nervousness; most people are nervous when being interviewed for the telly, and they need a bit more time to process their thoughts and get them out.