Language

Just in case you’re getting

jittery, chill out. For years
we’ve been told that
coffee is no good for you.
It was fake news.
1600, resulting in “Italian caffè; compare French café, Spanish café, Por-
tuguese café, German kaffee, Danish, Swedish kaffe.”
The English coffee, perhaps through Old English, Anglo-Saxon
Germanic roots, is closer to the Dutch koffie and earlier German coffee
and koffee.
Giorgio Milos, writing in The Atlantic, traced “Coffee’s Mysterious
Origins.” The most popular origin story is the legend of an Ethiopian
shepherd who noticed that his goats got perky after munching a certain
bush. He tried it and, before you could say Triple, Venti, Half Sweet, Non-
Fat, Caramel Macchiato … we have Starbucks all over the world.
Whatever the origin, centuries before Starbucks, there were
coffeehouses in the Ottoman Empire where people gathered to sip and
shmooze. An article in Moment magazine has it that “In 1650, a Lebanese

Brain Juice
known as ‘Jacob the Jew’ founded the first English coffeehouse in
Oxford.”
Just in case you’re getting jittery, chill out. For years we’ve been told
that coffee is no good for you. It was fake news.
Dr. Robert Shmerling wrote on the Harvard Health blog about claims
MORDECHAI SCHILLER
that coffee “could raise your blood pressure, make your heart race, impair
sleep, and maybe even cause cancer.” But, the doc wrote, “There’s increas-
The war’s over. And we lost. The cyber barbarians stormed the gates ing evidence that coffee might actually be good for you. So good that doc-
and tore down the walls of privacy. tors might begin recommending it.” The evidence shows that “Moderate
Long before the war, though, medical offices would poke our privacy coffee consumption (three to four cups per day) has been linked with lon-
with invasive forms. I got to an item asking me to list all medications I ger lifespan. … Other studies have found that coffee drinkers may have a
was taking. I dutifully answered: reduced risk of cardiovascular dis-
“Caffeine and alcohol.” ease, type 2 diabetes, Parkinson’s
OK, so the second was an exaggeration. Although I am on good terms disease … liver cancer, cirrhosis Answers to Apr 24 Puzzle
with John Barleycorn, my drinking is more religion than regimen. [and] gout.”
Why “religion”? One morning, my brother Rabbi Nota Schiller went to (Read this fast: This column is
a shul in Manhattan. After the services, one fellow blocked the door and not intended to be a substitute for
said, “Ain’t nobody leaving without making a l’chaim.” professional medical advice, diag-
My brother complied. Later, giving a lecture to a group of executives, nosis, or treatment. Always seek the
he asked how many knew someone who could drink before 8:30 in the advice of a medical maven.)
morning. Not a single one. “So how do you figure,” he asked, “here I was French author Honoré de Balzac
in shul and all of them were drinking at 7 in the morning?” reputedly drank 50 cups of coffee
Then he answered, “Some people drink meichaim — to get away from a day. (How did he have the time
life. We drink l’chaim — to life!” to write so much?) Whatever the
I drink l’chaim occasionally — to celebrate occasions (may we have number, Balzac said that coffee
many happy ones). As for coffee, I don’t need an occasion. I make sure made “sparks shoot all the way up
that the blood level doesn’t get too high in my caffeine stream. to the brain. From that moment on,
Writers are notorious for alcohol consumption … and being consumed everything becomes agitated. Ideas
by alcohol. Writers have called drink the “giant killer” because it kills the quick-march into motion like bat-
giant of fear. talions of a grand army … and the Answers to Today’s Puzzle
I find writing is better fueled by coffee than by whiskey. Fear is not so battle rages. … the paper is spread
much my adversary as fatigue. One of my favorite slang names for coffee with ink — for the nightly labor
is “brain juice.” begins and ends with torrents of
As befitting a writer’s drink, the history and lexicon of coffee is steeped this black water. …”
in mystery. Even the origin of the word is lost in the mists of ancient lore. But it takes more than coffee to
Oxford English Dictionary says coffee comes from the “Arabic qahwah, in be a great writer. As Balzac put it,
Turkish pronounced kahveh, the name of the infusion or beverage; said “Many people claim coffee inspires
by Arab lexicographers to have originally meant ‘wine’ or some kind of them, but, as everybody knows, cof-
wine, and to be a derivative of a verb-root qahiya ‘to have no appetite.’” fee only makes boring people even
OED adds, “Some have conjectured that it is a foreign, perhaps African, more boring.” n
word disguised, and have thought it connected with the name of Kaffa in
the south Ethiopian highlands, where the plant appears to be native. But Please send smiles, sticks and stones to
of this there is no evidence. …” language@hamodia.com.
The Turkish word kahveh seems to have arrived in Europe around

FEATURES April 25, 2018 29