Such bliss to be trendy! You sip a cappuccino on a Paris quai, languidly riffling through the foxed pages of your most recent incunabulary acquisition, a 1495 edition of Ovid’s Ars amatoria, purchased from a bouquiniste’s stall pitched on the parapets along the slow-flowing Seine. Past your table saunters a learned throng of students ambling toward the Sorbonne.

To your cappuccino-tasting companion, you comment on how Starbuck’s, hot coffee merchants, had to tidy up their corporate logo of a mermaid in the United States . American fundies thought the rippling waves under the mermaid’s split tail fin were obscene, pudendal, alarming. Ewwwww! A sea-going yoni in the middle of a God-fearin’ Amurrican coffee shop. Summon the Marines! “Yes, soldier, eyes left! Possible yonic visual reference in public food emporium.” On second thought, belay that summons to the Marines, mate. They might attempt to mount the mermaid logo.

Any hint of female sexual power naturally dismays and frightens worthy Christian gentlemen. For, of course, these sexist bigots and spiritual twits are the same evangelical rocket scientists who just re-elected George Bush; so it’s no strain to calibrate their collective brain mass and its approximate equivalence to the weight of one hair from the Dynel wig of Tammy Faye Baker.

Let us therefore press on to matters of weightier import, to wit, the origin of the coffee term, cappuccino. A cappuccino is a coffee drink made of espresso, steamed milk, and milk foam. Espresso is an Italian past participle meaning “pressed out.” A coffee-making machine invented in Italy at the beginning of the 20th century contains a pump that presses or forces hot water through fine-ground coffee. The expressed coffee is thick and sweet and rich. Steamed milk foam is beaten into the espresso and a daub of frothy, foamy milk from the top of the steaming milk pitcher is floated on the surface of the coffee. That’s a cappuccino.

Cappuccino means ‘little hood’ or ‘little monk’s cowl.’ Capucchio is ‘hood’ and –ino is a common Italian diminutive ending, hence ‘little hood.’ Capucchio is from Late Latin cappa ‘cap, cape, hooded cloak, small head gear,’ possibly shortened from the Late Latin noun capitulare ‘headdress,’ ultimately from Latin caput ‘head.’

Cappuccino was first the Italian term for a Capuchin friar. The colour of the coffee reminded Italians of the brown robes of one of the Roman Catholic orders of monks, namely the Capuchins. They wore brown robes with pointed hoods. It is said the first cappuccino coffee served had little peaks of milky foam that looked like these pointed hoods.

This borrowing of a formal ecclesiastical term to name something secular and lowly is part of the broad, quite healthy, anticlerical, usually anti-Catholic humour that is widespread in Italy. Hundreds of words and phrases mock the omnipresent Roman Catholicism of Italy. My own favourite is the thick pasta called strozzaprete ‘priest-strangler.’ As one might imagine, Rome is the epicentre of these sacrilegious quakes. The hypocritical and licentious shenanigans of nuns and priests futtering in the shrubs of la citta vaticana have kept the temporarily eternal city laughing for centuries.

There is a feminine Italian word cappuccina ‘Capuchin nun.’ But on the Roman street it almost always means a salad of mixed herbs and is a not-too-sly reference to the supposed texture of a nun's unsullied pubic hair. Any visitors who know other anticlerical gems from la bella lingua are urged to email them to me.

The Capuchin order was founded by Matteo di Bassi of Urbino (died 1552), split from the Franciscans. The name refers to the pointed cowl or capuche worn by the brothers. The rule from 1529 emphasized the Fran-ciscan ideals of poverty, austerity and contemplative prayer. They were an important force during the Counter-Reformation. The severity of the rule has been somewhat mitigated, but they are still the strictest of the Franciscan orders.

Capuchin Franciscan friars have a sonorous Latin title worth saying aloud. Capuchins belong to the Ordo Fratrum Minorum Capuccinorum, often abbreviated to O.F.M.Cap. ‘The Order of the Friars Minor of the Little Hoods.’

The etymology of the word coffee begins in an Arabic word for prepared liquid, qahwah. It could mean wine or coffee. Turkish picked it up as kahve and Italian borrowed it as caffè, and then as French café and English coffee, it conquered the world.

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© 2005 William Gordon Casselman

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