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Can you offer a “Medium” drink without also having a “small” and “large” size?

Granted, this is mostly rhetorical, but maybe someone can shine some logic on this shadowy area of food service. I went to a coffee place today and asked for a “small” coffee. The lady said “we don’t have small. We got medium and large.” I attempted to explain that it didn’t make sense; that “medium” is a term of comparison that only exists between a small and a large size. She then told me that “medium” and “large” were the only size they had. I told her I would take “the smaller of the two sizes you just showed me.” She was very upset and had someone else serve me. The new person just laughed and said “yeah, we got rid of the medium. We actually call it “regular.”

Not wanting to sound like Mr. Spock, but your logic is correct. In order to have a “medium”, you need to have two points of comparison, one smaller and one larger than that which is “medium” (which is Latin for “in the middle”).

Pragmatically speaking, however, there are 2 factors:

1) You were speaking to a low-ranked employee. Basically, she is going to use whatever nomenclature she is told to use. Whether or not it makes logical sense is irrelevant to her. She’d have called those 2 sizes “Super Huge” and “Humongous” if she was told to by her bosses. She was the consequence, not the cause, and logically, you cannot alter the cause by acting solely on the consequence.

2) Culturally speaking, there are practices that become accepted and repeated without questioning. One of them is what we generally consider a “small”, a “medium” and a “large” beverage. Normally, “small” is no larger than about 300ml; “medium” is around 500ml and “large” is anywhere above 700ml. So if a place is offering a beverage that comes in a size no smaller than, say, 500ml, they will tend to call it “medium”, because it is too big to be “small” and too small to be “large”. It is a question of subjective expectancy. People don’t order a “small” beverage and expect to receive a half-a-liter bottle (the reaction would be: “you call this ’small’??!”). In that context, it becomes irrelevant that there is insufficient a framework of comparison to establish a “medium”; it is all about meeting a subconscious expectation in terms of size.