Second cup of coffee needed
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Starbucks has opened its first retail outlet for healthy fruit and vegetable juices, in Bellevue, WA. And . . .
Oh dear. Perhaps the signwriter should have ordered a venti instead of a tall. Because that's not how you spell vegetables.
Language Log will try to avert its gaze while ordering.
The initial letter sequence of vegan must have been the interfering cognitive factor here. And the general tendency for a g followed by e or i to have the sound [ʤ], as in vegetable, is really not much use: it doesn't hold for get, gecko, gelding, geese, geyser, gibbon, giddy, gift, gigabyte, gimlet, git, give . . . Almost useless. Not even the general principle that g followed by a always corresponds to [g] is exceptionless: it fails in the word margarine. What a totally dreadful spelling system English has. Don't ever imagine that a person's spelling errors betoken low intelligence or lack of linguistic ability. They don't.
[Never mind about commants. Have a jiuce.]