g_hanson

Yes, absolutely. We should avoid harkening back to word roots in obscure languages to seek meaning. Yes, damn it, yes. You're right. Why are we considering Italian at all? Espresso is an English word -- hell, the stuff's not even called espresso in Italy, right? So espresso is an English word for coffee brewed using certain techniques and that's all. However Discerning readers skip this paragraph. OED never goes to the Latin, it goes to Italian. (The scroll bar is the thingy on the side of the window. Words are the short black patterns on the white background. Reading is what you do with words.) Say "American Heritage." Now say "OED." See, they're different! Okay, here's a thought experiment. You walk up to the counter at Tully's. Mr. Goatee says "We had a rough morning. This guy came in and ordered an espresso. So I started making it, just for this guy. But after I tamped the grounds, the water ran out. Some valve was closed. I'm trying to make direct, nonstop, fast coffee here, for crying out loud! It took about ten minutes to get the water back up and running. So he walks out because it wasn't fast enough. I made one cup, and now the machine's not working again. I didn't make it for you, and I didn't make it quickly. But it was pressed out using pressure through pressed grounds, and it's fresh. You can have it if you want. "Or just for you, I can quickly boil down this cup of drip coffee. The latest microwave technology, you know. Just for you, quickly, as soon as you order it. Tastes great, I swear. "You want espresso, right? Which one do you want? It really depends on your definition of espresso, doesn't it." (He's a cheeky bastard, Mr. Goatee is.) Okay, it's game time. Multiple choice: caffe ristretto = restricted (pull) caffe lungo = long (pull) caffe macchiato = marked (with milk) [li]caffe espresso =[/ul] a. pressed b. made expressly for you quickly at the moment you order it Not proof of anything, of course. Actually, espresso drinkers are notorious for not "getting" dictionaries. I've read some of the rants, and they are uniformly just that: ahistorical, masturbatory, self-congratulatory rants. "My experience defines the universe, and dictionaries are totally fucked for not agreeing with what I think. Wow, I am actually smarter than the dictionary! Kiss my ass, Noah!" At the time when "espresso" first dipped its robust yet delicate toes into the English language and decided "I'm staying!", Achille Gaggia was just on the cusp of making the first "modern" espresso, so for the most part, espresso was made using steam. The 1945 citation of first English usage, by the way, includes its own definition: "I was drinking a caffe espresso, a strong, bitter, steamed coffee." Fast forward three years from 1945. Achille, with whom we are on a first name basis by now, creates this new machine. Note how the opportunity is lost here. This stuff is so different that in retrospect, we have to modify the word. Modern espresso. "Achille, bambino," we cry from sixty years in the future, "non es espresso, es crema!" Achille replies "pidgin Italian? Fuggedaboutit. I acknowledge the history of this coffee called espresso and frankly, the customer base is already in place for espresso machines. Why mess with success?" So even as you praise him, curse the name of Achille Gaggia! Because of him, dictionaries must for reasons of technical accuracy include mention of steam. And that cheap Krups machine, the "why's this so much cheaper than that" model, that, too, really is an espresso machine. Those Italian percolator, those too are legitimately "espresso pots." In the interest of full disclosure, unprompted, I report that the OED is one of those damnable "Fahrenheit 451 'em!" dictionaries that only has the "steam" definition. And I think this definition (Merriam-Webster's Third New International, Unabridged, considered by many word geeks as second in authority to OED if dated, and which agrees with It. "pressed out") is delightful: 3: a neighborhood shop where friends gather to drink espresso. Ah, no strangers, no enemies. Intelligence. Contradicting intelligence. The first report, repackaged. "We have absolute confirmation!" Actually, something there is very interesting indeed! Thank you for reposting, because I missed it the first time around. There's no X in Italian. "Expres" is a French word. A mystery! I thought up a signature. What do y'all think? My *real* job is keeping slkinsey busy. Edited by Phaelon56 for OT political discussion

It really depends what we're arguing about here. So a "hamburger" originally meant "ground meat like they serve in Hamburg, Germany" but that's not really what it means in modern American usage. Whatever a caffe espresso originally meant, it now means "made at the moment you order it," according to Lo Zing. Agreed. Or maybe not agreed. Shall we delve into signifiers and signifieds? Note that there is no history of the word in Lo Zing, so there's no way to determine whether its current usage is a back-formation from the phrase "caffe espresso," whatever its original derivation. For example, "turkey burger" is a back-formation unrelated to the German root-word "burg." Without the history of the word its impossible to tell. Care for some ground meat like they serve in Turkeyburg, Germany? Erm, I think not. Not close. Just calling it the OED of Italian doesn't make it so. From the looks of it, perhaps equivalent to the "Shorter OED." So lets turn to the "Shorter OED of Italian." There, indeed, is why we should care what the OED has to say. Right there. Inside the square brackets. From the English express, 1853. In 1853, in English, express didn't mean 'fast'. So not giving the history of the word badly misleads the reader. A boring history aside. The word "express" meaning "fast" is closely tied to the railroads. It happens that the railroad boom in England and the US predated the Italian railroad boom by thirty years -- Italy's began post-1866. Which is why Italian is borrowing that constellation of meanings from English. I pull up to the Flying-J truckstop outside Cheyenne and step inside to the restaurant. Before I take a stool, a waitress parks herself before me, a blonde with pink satin showing three different places. I'm still standing while she pours me a long, slow smile and a hot cuppa joe. I step into Tully's in Noe Valley in San Francisco and stand on line. Eventually, I shuffle up to the counter, where I place my order with a harried young man. I think "my goatee's better than his" and then I stand to the side, waiting. The world sounds like milk steaming. I think I hear my name over the shrrr of steam, but no, I'm mistaken. I stare at the mugs on display. So why is espresso the fast one? To venture another guess, what about this. It really comes from the French, whose "cafe pression" (French press coffee) really does mean "pressed out." A bit of lazy elision and comical cross-cultural misunderstanding in heavy accents gives "caff' epressio" which becomes "caffe espresso." Holy cow! [santa Vacca!] Call Lo Zing! An Italian in Brooklyn is using a dialect of Italian thought to have gone extinct before 1600! Uh, no, just checked the OED again. Turns out that Fat Guy was right. It does mean "eat me."

OED (2nd Ed) gives 'expresso,' pronounced with an "ex," as a variant of 'espresso,' pronounced with an "ess." Google gives 4.55M-hits for espresso, versus 840k-hits for expresso. Two notes: First, scanning the first 30 hits, only one in the first thirty had to do with coffee. Second, all the paid ads had to do with coffee. So the ex- usage is out there and is common enough that companies are willing to pay to be linked to that word as well. (Googling espresso + coffee = 1.5M-hits, expresso + coffee = 90k-hits, which probably gives a better estimate of relative usage in English.) As for etymology, OED concurs with other English sources: [it. caffè espresso, lit. 'pressed-out coffee'.] Looking at the word 'express,' [... L. exprimre of which the chief senses were 1. to press out; 2. to form (an image) by pressure, to represent in sculpture or painting 3. to represent or set forth in words or actions.] Clearly, one can't just look at 21st century usage of an Italian word to determine the derivation of a word coined more than a hundred years ago. In fact, looking at the English usage of the word 'express' (assuming, in the absence of other information, that italian usage was roughly parallel) shows that the time of first usage in Italian would apparently be of key interest. Pressing forward in the investigation of circumstantial evidence: "express" meaning "pressed" is an old word, circa 1400. "express" meaning "specially intended" is another old word, also circa 1400. "express" meaning "fast" is a recent word, first known usage in English, 1897. The first European patent for a steam-pressure coffee machines was granted 1821. If the phrase originates from this date, it almost certainly refers to pressed out (due to pressure - again, with the Latin root premere), as such machines made coffee by the pot. Bezzera's main 1901 innovation was to design for individual cups of coffee. So if he coined the phrase, then my guess, only a guess, is that the innovation was "expressly for you." However, that means that there must have been eighty years of coffee being similarly made by steam pressure without "pressure" ever figuring into the name. So my feeling is that this is a less likely derivation. Could it mean "fast"? Conceivable, but unlikely, given the timing. The original "express trains" weren't particularly fast at all -- they were rather "specially intended" to travel from one particular station to another particular station. It looks like until at least 1909, at least, high speed "express" was limited to modifying the hardware -- freight [meaning freight train], boiler, pump, lift [elevator], etc. OED presents other usage (express cleaners, expressway) both in 1938. So in English, at least, it would appear that the most likely usage would have been "express coffeemaker".