On 22 July 2008 the Sydney Morning Herald noted that while most restaurants have menus that list such coffee drinks as 'lattes, mugacino, cappuccino, espresso macchiato', the ‘poor tea drinker will be lucky if there are one or two teas listed’. On 24 December 2007, the Melbourne Age saw the mugacino as less than flash: 'The next time you're forcing your way through a "mugachino" at some soulless shopping centre coffee shop, remember it doesn't have to be that way.' Back in 1997 the British linguist David Crystal commented on his interest in Australian coffee terms: 'he was struck by new words he heard in Brisbane—mugaccinno (capuccinno in a mug), mallowccinno (cappuccino with marshmallow)' (Melbourne Age 19 August).
The world of coffee terms often seems very complex or perhaps very pretentious. 'Mallowcinno' seems to be a fairly rare bird (especially with the spelling 'mallowccinno'), but 'mugacino', in all its spellings, is much more common: mugacino, mugachino, mugaccinno, mugaccino. It is now clear that mugacino is an Australian term.
The word mugacino is modelled on cappuccino, a type of coffee with a head of frothy milk. The word cappuccino in this sense first appeared in English in 1948, although its history in Italian is obviously much longer. It is the same word as Capuchin (in Italian cappucino), a member of an Order of Friars Minor, a branch of the Franciscans. The Italian form goes back to Italian capuccio or capuche meaning 'hood', and it is the long distinctive hood (or cowl) that is part of their habit that generated the Capuchin’s name (and in turn generated the term Capuchin monkey, 'an American monkey (Cebus capucinus) with black hair at the back of the head, looking something like a cowl'). Most dictionaries suggest that the colour of a cappuccino matches the colour of a Capuchin’s habit, and that this is how the coffee term arose—although the greyish-brown colour of the Capuchin habit does not quite look like the colour of your ideal cappuccino.
The term babycino is now used worldwide as a kind of designer refreshment for young designer children—a cup of frothy milk sprinkled with chocolate. Are mugacino and babycino blends (mug + (capp)uccino, baby + (cappuc)cino), or has -(a)cino become a new combining form, that might in the future produce more compounds: soyacino, lattecino, etc.?
An unkind view of the Australian mugacino has it that it arose from a misunderstanding of the Italian cappuccino, which was interpreted ocker-wise as cup-a-cino or cup-of-cino. Once that misinterpretation was made, the way was open for the cup to be transformed into the larger mug!
Whatever the case, mugacino has established itself as an Australianism. The term was first recorded in 1994.
