as a preface, I personally have never had a barista fail to know what black coffee mean, I understand your point but, I see black coffee to fall under the same area with no wiggle room.

A black coffee is exactly that, when you modify it it’s no longer a black coffee. Just like if you say you are cashing a check but you want to deposit it instead, that’s depositing a check not cashing it. When you add a modifier to a word like that, the expectation is that the modifier is honored.

I don’t see a precedent where a black coffee should be able to be misconstrued. I can understand your example of the drip coffee, but people saying that are going to just use “drip coffee”, “coffee”, “normal coffee” or any other phrase that isn’t already an existing product in the world. And if it is misconstrued by the consumer, that is the customers problem, and if they receive the wrong product they will realize the issue and fix it for next time. We shouldn’t be redefining existing definitions or products to fit for those cases.

You could change how you order it but, the fact is it shouldn’t be required for an establishment to provide what is ordered. The barista not knowing what a black coffee is, at the end of the day is a failure on the establishment, and indicates the employee likely wasn’t trained adequately for the job. Forcing the consumer to change how they order may help the customer, but it isn’t going to help the underlining issue which is that the barista doesn’t know what “black coffee” means, so its just going to disadvantage the next customer who does order the product.

as an ammendum though: if this was consistantly happening to me(i.e its clear it isn’t just a simple mistake due to being overworked or not caring), I likely would change the way I ordered, or more realistically stop going to that establishment because that’s a orange or yellow flag for me training wise.