Q&A: ‘Barista’ vs ‘barrister’

Each week here at the Australian Writers’ Centre, we dissect and discuss, contort and retort, ask and gasp at the English language and all its rules, regulations and ridiculousness. It’s a celebration of language, masquerading as a passive-aggressive whinge about words and weirdness. This week, courtrooms and cafes..

Q: Hi AWC, did you have a nice break?

A: Sure did. How about you?

Q: I spent it hanging out in cafes reading and writing. It was bliss! In fact, that brings me to my question.

A: Is it about the difference between a latte and a flat white? Most of the time, probably what it’s served in!

Q: Maybe, but not if you have a good BARISTA…

A: What’s happening? Why did you put it in capital letters like that?

Q: Because that is my question! Where does the word ‘barista’ come from?

A: You might be shocked to learn that this word is really quite modern – only existing for as long as people have been getting snobby about coffee.

Q: You’ll have to be more specific.

A: Merriam Webster dictionary first listed it in 1982 – and it didn’t go worldwide until the 1990s. English is the only language that relates it solely to coffee.

Q: But it sounds very Italian!

A: Well okay, it HAS been borrowed from Italian, but over there, it’s used in a far more generic way – as in someone who works any kind of bar; what we’d call a “bartender”. 

Q: Fascinating!

A: Well if you want your mind blown even more, it’s basically from the same place etymologically as “barrister”.

Q: Wait, what? Objection, your honour!

A: Overruled. Approach the bench please.

Q: How is a barrister the same as a barista? For starters, one gets paid a lot more than the other. And there are not many movie climaxes where a barista gives a big closing argument – isn’t that true?

A: You can’t handle the truth!

Q: Hilarious.

A: Obviously these days you’re not going to mistake them. After all, most barristers would probably burn the milk and their latte art is atrocious. The word “barrister” did start off in the same way though – someone who works at a bar. It emerged in the 1500s from the bar in a courtroom – the wooden railing that marks off the area around where the judge sat, prisoners stand and a barrister makes their fancy speeches. 

Q: Objection! They’re not always fancy, sometimes they’re very boring.

A: Sustained. The “–ist” part just means “one who does or makes”. In the case of a barrister, it took the “–ister” ending from Old French “–istre” while languages like Spanish and Italian preferred the Latin “ista”. We saw a rise in these in English during the 1970s as words spilled over like “fashionista” or revolutionary terms like “Fidelista” or “Sandinista”.

Q: So it made sense that the cafes chose to go with the top-knotted, Che Guevara shirt-wearing version in “barista”.

A: Well remember, the word “barista” was already Italian, but simply as any barman – not specifically coffee. It’s likely that the rise of Starbucks and other coffee ‘bars’ during the 1980s necessitated the need for a name.

Q: And they wanted something ‘grande’!

A: Exactamundo.

Q: Ooooh, is “exactamundo” Italian too?

A: Nope. It’s slang that was made popular by TV character “Fonzie” in Happy Days and is a mix of “exact” and the Spanish word “mundo” meaning “the people who live in the world” to mean “precisely; absolutely”. Spanish does use “exactamente” for a similar thing though.

Q: English is quite the melting pot.

A: Or coffee mug in this case.

Q: So, to recap, “barista” and “barrister” both mean people that work at a bar. It’s just that one came along about 450 years after the other one?

A: That’s right. So next time you think you’re being clever by making a joke to the barista who is putting themselves through law school, you’ll know that the two words have more in common than just sounding similar.

Q: No further questions, your honour.

A: Great. Wanna get a coffee?

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