Most people have tasted coffee or tea at some point in their lives. Probably the exceptions would be babies and those whose particular beliefs would prevent it. My preference is for coffee, but I have no beliefs that would prevent having tea. I have tea quite often. We have a coffee tree in our backyard, but I prefer to buy my coffee at the store.
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The early history of coffee is obscure. But from what I can gather the coffee plant was "discovered" in Ethiopia in the 11th century. The leaves were boiled in water and the resulting concoction was thought to have medicinal properties.
It was carried to Batavia and was successfully cultivated. It has since been cultivated throughout the world, or at least where conditions allow.
A popular Ethiopian legend is that coffee was discovered by a goat herder named Kaldi, who found his goats full of energy after eating the fruit of the coffee shrub. Kaldi tried the fruit and had a similar reaction.
It must have been good coffee. By the 16th century, it had reached the rest of the Middle East, South Persia, South East Asia and then to America.
English appears to have got the name from the Turkish kahvrh about1600, according to my big dictionary. But it also comes from Arabic qahwah.
According to my Macquarie dictionary many words associate with coffee. How about coffee bar, coffee break, coffee bush, coffee cake, coffee crystals, coffee cup, coffee
grinder, coffee winch, coffee house, coffee money, coffee palace, coffee pot, coffee royal, coffee scroll, coffee shop, coffee table and coffee tree?
My Websters includes "coffee klatch" which it describes as a "small social gathering, especially of women, for informal conversation while drinking coffee". My wife can't understand why, when I finish my cup of coffee, I want to leave the restaurant. Now I can tell my wife'"klatch" and see if I get a response.
Coffee entered the English language in the years leading to 1598.
In 1598, according to my big dictionary, "the Turkes holde almost the same manner of drinking of their Chaoua, which they make of a certain fruit...." Chaoua was one of a number of spellings of coffee.
This was the first occasion I could find coffee in the English language. It was described as "a mild stimulant".
A joke going the rounds was "this coffee tastes like mud". The reply is "so it should. It was ground only yesterday".
They even made a dictionary devoted to coffee. Coffee and its other words according to the big dictionary number so many they would fill this space, so I won't even try. Then we come to café. Thus was a French term that entered the English language before 1789. It came into the English language via the Italian. It was introduced for a class of restaurant. One name was was café-haunting. The Webster tells us caffeine mixed "in large doses is poisonous".
According to Websters cafe describes a "barroom or night club Readers Digest says Greasy Spoon is slang and describes a restaurant whose food is cheap and no bargain "and which is often as unsavoury as the name suggests.
I have never found a Greasy Spoon. lauriebarber.com;lbarber.com.au