I still recall, with a mixture of amusement and embarrassment, the time I took a visiting Italian friend to lunch in a café along London's Holloway Road. After studying the menu, he ordered a mozzarella and tomato panino – ‘so that'll be one panini for you’, jotted down the young woman behind the counter. My friend confirmed his choice by repeating it in a way that signified he could speak only for himself. And to make his point, he leaned somewhat on the singular -o of the ending, keen, I imagined, to avoid the kind of mix-up that leads to extra portions being brought to one's restaurant table in error. But to no avail: before proceeding to take his order, our waitress told my companion firmly, in an unmistakeably eastern European accent, that he would be having a ‘mozzarella and tomato panini’, and that was that.