What do “staccato” and “legato” mean in music?

Music vocabulary in English borrowed almost wholesale from Italian. Staccato means “detached, short” and tells a musician to play each note crisply, with silence between. Legato means “tied, smooth” and tells them to play the notes joined together without a break. Both words show up on every piano sheet music page in the world, marked with dots (staccato) or curved lines (legato). Italian music vocabulary spread across Europe in the 1600s and 1700s, when Italian composers and conductors trained much of the continent.

In this clip, a comedy bit about practicing piano stacks the Italian terms: “too staccato, too legato, too vibrato. I should’ve quit.” The joke only works because every English speaker recognizes the music words.