LFP: Large Fry, Please

Lately I feel really uneasy with the speech of some natively pseudo-English speaking folk around me.

It has become very common for one to say “large fry, please”, while ordering French fries at a restaurant. This obviously grammatically incorrect phrase is bugging me because I continuously imagine one giant potato French fry being served, or a squirt of hot frying oil dished in response. It is also bugging me because of the unstoppable rate at which the English language is constantly getting abridged. We already pronounce such idiomatic abbreviations as LOL and TTYL aloud instead of using their full length counterparts.

I understand that this could be one of those inevitable morphologies of the language, similar to the “beer me” and “one beer, please” slogans. However, unlike the aforementioned idioms, which, are used with an implied hint of humor, the “large fry please” often comes with a serious face. The person saying this slogan is confident that they are speaking correctly.

Not only is the word fry more ambiguous than a French fry, or a potato fry, the speaker is too lazy to simply state “a large serving/size/portion of French fries, please”. Maybe this happens because even the McDonalds menu often doesn’t bother specifying.

Whilst, a “large fry, please” is probably easy to understand in an adequate situation of a McDonalds restaurant. However, making suchlike statement in a different situation could be rather confusing. Imagine a child telling a parent that they want to eat a “large fry”.

What is next: “LFP” instead of the annoyingly lengthy ”large fry, please”?

My argument may be a slippery slope, but not a far fetched one. I’m afraid that in an age where communication is the absolute backbone of our society, speech may slowly devolve to be abridged to the point of nonsense

Now I’m not a native English speaker, and maybe I shouldn’t criticize others, but a big part of being and immigrant and learning a foreign language is absorbing it from the surrounding people; as it turns out that kind of learning is not such a wise idea.