Unless you’re doing science or law (and even then often), if people know what you mean when you refer to something, then you’ve used the “name” correctly.

I’m glad you bring that up right away. This is actually the whole reason I reacted. I am really tired of having to hunt down places where I can get reasonably good coffee, and note them so I can return. I often get the wrong drink when ordering “coffee”. As a result, I got the equipment to make it myself. However, it still triggers me when I see people referring to “Milk coffee” as “Coffee”. It is so not the same drink.

It is so common to add milk or sugar to coffee that there is minimal connotation of “black coffee” in the word “coffee” as people use it, at least in US English. For this reason, specifying “black coffee” is much more necessary than “straight vodka” in actual speech.

And, part of the reason why I cannot get “coffee” when ordering literally “coffee”, is this. As you put it, it is so common to add milk or sugar to coffee. Well, there’s nothing wrong with liking milk or sugar (in moderation), but then let’s be honest, that person likes milk and/or sugar, not coffee. It’s just a variation on “hot chocolate”. Which BTW suffers from the exact same issue. Give 99% chocolate to people who say they like chocolate, and check their face: they like sugar and fat, not chocolate. But chocolate isn’t the subject at hand, so let’s focus on coffee.

It’s very funny to want people to invent a whole new word that is the equivalent of white russian for putting milk in coffee.

“Milk coffee”. “Cream coffee”. Wait, did I just invent those!? 🤯

There’s no benefit to it.

• Unambiguous communication
• Logical naming convention, that can be intuited by any foreign person
• Promoting healthier diets, as drinking sugar and/or fat as opposed to eating it, is a leading cause of cardiovascular diseases, obesity and health complications

Just to name a few.

If you want to be pretentious about preferring to drink your coffee a certain way, you can do that anytime. Or maybe you can give it a special name. From now on drinking coffee black is called Asshole Coffee. Put it in the dictionary.

No, “asshole coffee” already has a name, it is “diarrhea”. Besides, it is absolutely not safe to drink, I would not recommend.

It’s a bit different with espresso drinks because those do have specific names that are in common usage and ostensibly those names refer to something like a recipe.

I’ll just refer to your note there. No, it isn’t consistent. There is a similar problem with espresso. I take that you live in a large city, with established customs and where you can reasonably expect “X product” to range from “here” to “there” with variations pertaining to attention to detail, skill, quality of the products, etc. But I do not, and in many places, you simply cannot order a “cortado”. The staff will look at you in a state of partial confusion and will dismiss your request with an explicit list of what they have. Which will likely be “tea, coffee, soda, lemonade, sirup and various alcohols”. In which case ordering the “coffee” will be akin to playing a sort of (white) russian roulette, if I may, but with coffee as a theme.

But nobody’s confused if you ask for a coffee and someone asks if you want milk in it (or room for milk), and nobody’s confused if you get coffee and add milk to it. Or if you don’t.

Yes, people sometimes ask if you want milk in it. In which case I usually order a different drink, because I know their “coffee” will likely not taste good without it.

Because we all have a shared usage of the word coffee which does not stipulate additives.

That is a bug, not a feature. It is actually the whole reason I reacted. We all share a usage of the word “coffee”. But there is probably as many definitions of it as there are people using it, so we clearly do not share the meaning of that term.

This is, BTW, much less of a problem with milk coffee, or cream coffee, since milk or cream has orders of magnitude less variation. It’s always cow milk, usually 1.5 or 3% fat, etc. Maybe it’s slightly different with the word cream, since apparently some people would use plain “heavy” cream.