café

The little acute accent on café is a linguistic postcard from French: the word entered English as an essentially unadapted borrowing, carrying both the drink and the place where people drink it. French café itself is a doublet of Italian caffè and English coffee, so these apparently different words are really members of one international coffee family. By the eighteenth century, cafés in places such as Paris had become bustling rooms for newspapers, arguments, chess, and political conspiracy—not merely counters for espresso. The word therefore names both a beverage and a social stage: order a café, and you may be asking for coffee, the establishment, or the whole atmosphere of ideas percolating over a cup.