Al ristorante: chiedere posate e bacchette

What does “bacchette” mean in Italian?

Order at a sushi place in Italy and you ask for le bacchette — chopsticks. The fun part: bacchetta is one little word for many thin, stick-like things. A bacchetta magica is a magic wand, the conductor waves a bacchetta, and a drummer plays with bacchette. So chopsticks are really just “the little sticks,” and learning one word hands you four.

It comes from Latin baculum, “staff,” shrunk down to a diminutive that means any slim rod. The same root powers the idiom comandare a bacchetta, “to rule with an iron fist.” At the table, note that bacchette stays plural like English “chopsticks” — and so does posate, the word in this clip for forks, spoons and knives, since Italian bundles cutlery into one plural too.