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by nonameiguess 879 days ago
He's English, not American, and became a coffee influencer like this after winning the World Barista Championship in 2007. This is, in fact, a "world" championship, not like the MLB World Series which is really just American. It's been held in the USA a few times, but also all over Europe, Australia, Japan, and Korea. Making coffee meticulously is hardly something specific to Americans or even typical of Americans. It's very weird you would even have this stereotype when the very word "barista" is Italian, the WBC itself started in Norway, and Europe in general is usually far more associated with fine cuisine and caring about craftmanship in food and drink than the US, which is associated with hot dogs, light beer, and deep frying everything in butter.
1 comments

>the very word "barista" is Italian

now hol' up

in English, we have a suffix -ist for a person who does something: machinist, pianist, flautist. In Italian, they instead use the suffixes -isto or -ista to mean the same thing (which suggests English got "ist" from Norman French)

what does this particular -ista do? stands at a bar, that's why they are bar-isti. What's a bar, in Italy? well, "bar" not an Italian word, they borrowed the word from English.