COFFEE TALK
Skylar: Maybe we could go out for coffee sometime?
Will: Great, or maybe we could go somewhere and just eat a bunch of caramels.
Skylar: What?
Will: When you think about it, it’s just as arbitrary as drinking coffee.
* * *
You might recognize the above dialogue from the movie Good Will Hunting. And you might think of it as charming and astute, which is a fair assessment of a clever script. Yet this marginal bit of irreverent dialogue gets me to thinking about whether the notion of drinking coffee really is arbitrary ??? or whether it is, in fact, a constant nucleus of the way we engage with one another in a world with ever-changing social dynamics.
Imagine shopping centers without coffee shops. Cities without cafes. Bookstores without coffee counters. Imagine any consumable that is as pervasive as coffee. I can???t think of a one. And whether you enjoy the drink or not, imagine the restraints it would put on social planning if you were forced never to give reference to coffee. Think about how common it is in our vernacular to say, ???Let???s go for a coffee??? ??? a simple sentence that translates to, ???Let???s get together to talk.??? The phrases could almost be considered interchangeable.
The liaison between coffee and conversing grew organically over time. An entire article could be written on the storied religious and political implications of coffee; of how it developed in Muslim culture as a means for public discourse in Mecca, spreading like wildfire on the tails of religious expansion. But, I???ll save that for another time and skip to the mid-20th century, where television advertising popularized instant coffee and gave housewives in newly suburban neighborhoods an easy way to entertain their friends. The cup of coffee became an excuse to gather and gossip ??? between sips ??? about the mundane, the personal and the desperate. Marilyn French???s feminist tome, The Women???s Room, details many scenes of women commiserating over coffee as they grapple with their evolving domestic roles. Meanwhile, the role of coffee was to effortlessly give breathing room to verbal exchanges; to act as a catalytic device for gathering people together.
Today, as a culture that is in a near constant state of consumption, it stands to reason that people are not content to meet at an empty table. And when it???s not meal time, or when the meal is over, where does the conversation continue? Instinctively, the answer is over a cup of coffee. Yes, there are those of us who shift over to other drinks, and some who don???t care for the drink in the first place. Still, water and wine aside, coffee is about as universal as it gets.
It???s even linguistically ubiquitous, synonymous with forums, gossip, old ladies and rebellious students alike. It exists as a phenomenon we call ???coffee talk???, made famously funny by Mike Myers in Saturday Night Live, with the affected nasal accent of a Jewish yenta. The association between this ???arbitrary??? beverage and the act of conversing in circles is as natural as the association between peanut butter and jelly. Even the programming technology, Java, takes its moniker from the popular beverage; and just as Java plays a role in bringing people together in the global community online, so too does coffee aid in bringing people together, in living color.
On occasion, this common beverage is besmirched for its bitterness, its very ubiquity, and its evolution into a world of overpriced and pretentious drinks that require monological skill to order off a menu. But one cannot deny the efficacy of coffee in its ability to hinge together a conversation, a study group, a forum, a first date, a reunion of old friends.
The drink itself is all at once an afterthought and the very crux of the social engagement ??? whether the people gathered together care for coffee or not is irrelevant; what???s significant is that it provides the impetus for gathering in the first place.
Besides, caramels stick to my teeth.
REFERENCES
The Roast and Post Coffee Company; History of coffee; the 20th century. 1998-2006. 10 March 2006. http://roastandpostcoffee.com/
Banks, M., McFadden, C., & Atkinson, C. (2005). The world encyclopedia of coffee. London, England: Lorenz Books.
