The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Mark Forsyth (Coffee) #80

Coffee

Balzac once wrote that:

This coffee falls into your stomach, and straightway there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move like the battalions of the Grand Army of the battlefield, and the battle takes place. Things remembered arrive at full gallop, ensuing to the wind. The light cavalry of comparisons deliver a magnificent deploying charge, the artillery of logic hurry up with their train and ammunition, the shafts of wit start up like sharpshooters. Similes arise, the paper is covered with ink; for the struggle commences and is concluded with torrents of black water, just as a battle with powder.

But Shakespeare never drank coffee. Nor did Julius Caesar, or Socrates. Alexander the Great conquered half the world without even a café latte to perk him up in the morning. The pyramids were designed and constructed without a whiff of a sniff of caffeine. Coffee was introduced to Europe only in 1615.

The achievements of antiquity are quite enough to cow the modern human, but when you realise that they did it all without caffeine it becomes almost unbearable. The words for coffee arrange themselves beautifully into highly-caffeinated spirals. Let’s start with espressos and consider what they have to do with expressing yourself.

An espresso is made in a little machine that presses steam outwards (e in Italian) through tightly-packed grains of coffee. It’s exactly the same process by which a cow expresses milk, or a sore expresses pus, and metaphorically it’s the same process by which your thoughts are expressed outwards from your brain through your mouth. Thus self-expression.

Those actions that have been thought about are premeditated, intentional and deliberate. If, for example, you have done something expressly for a purpose, it’s because you have thought about it.

How does this connect to express mail? Expressly came to mean for one particular purpose. A letter can be entrusted either to the tender mercies of the national postal system (who will probably lose it, burn it or deliver it back to you a month later with a fine) or it can be given to a paid messenger who has one express job: to deliver that one letter. This is an express delivery – one where a postman has been hired expressly for the purpose.

And the same is true of trains. Some trains stop at every station; no village halt or stray cow is too small or too irrelevant to slow you down. All this can be avoided, if rather than taking a stopping train you board one that is bound expressly for one particular destination. Such trains are now known as express trains, and they usually have a little buffet car where you can pay a small fortune for a tiny espresso.