I noticed how most coffee blogs I’ve perused have at least one post dedicated to the, albeit interesting to me, very long and, to an untrained eye, not-so-dramatic history of coffee.
Did you notice too?
I have a feeling that if you’re not a history buff, aren’t invested beyond the locally micro-roasted beans you’ve carefully chosen to put in your grinder, and/or don’t want to read one more post listing the literally hundreds of facts that without context just don’t mean a whole lot, then it was likely more of a courtesy glance, with a few dedicated seconds to key moments like: Guy Notices Goats Acting Crazy In Yemin or Women Support Group Forms in London After Coffee Thought to Cause Impotence in Their Men or maybe After Boston Tea Party It’s Coffee or Bust and possibly Coast Guard Officer Smuggles Brazilian Governor’s Daughter Coffee Seedlings for Love.
Side Note: I made those headlines up. It happened. It just didn’t look as exciting as that – Just in case you decide to look it up.
Anyway, I caught a Ted Talk back in September, “What we learned from 5 million books,” which described a new experiment in the halls of Google. We know the search engine giant has been madly scanning books from at least the moment the Kindle hit the market (probably earlier), but what you might not have known is they were also working on a feature that allowed you a bird’s eye view of key terms across the ages in the five million and counting books they’ve scanned. It’s called the N’gram Viewer.
Of course my first thought was, “Hm. What were the effects of coffee in the literary realm?” Afterall, isn’t literature a reflection of the world at large? In the weeks after, I became a little more than obsessed with the new widget. I started by researching how to say coffee in 65+ languages. Then, one at a time, I entered my key terms into the search box and ran the report: coffee, café, kava, kope, kave, buna, java, ahua, and so on. I played around with the dates a bit, but right now, the N’gram Viewer doesn’t allow you to go back any further than 1500. I looked at centuries, and in some cases I drilled down to decades. I’m personally enamored with the art deco and atomic eras, as if you couldn’t tell by looking at the Smokin Joes Coffee label. I left the ‘smoothing’ at three for good measure.
Well, it’s no shocker that the rise and fall of mentions in literature aligned with the rise and fall of coffee consumption across the globe and through the ages…although I did find it a little strange that nowhere in Google’s bazillion pages of scans was there a single reference to Smokin Joes Coffee. So odd, right? But below are a couple of interesting correlations I did find.
Warning: Coffee geek out session, commence.
Looking at late 18th century mentions of the various words for coffee in Ethiopia: ‘kaffa,’ ‘bunna,’ and ‘buni,’ first, you can see a correlating spike that is absolutely off the charts somewhere from the early 1760s thru the 1770s between ‘bunna’ and ‘buni.’ And then suddenly, for about 30 or 40 years, ‘bunna’ completely disappears from literature. You can see how one word took over another for a few decades. Kind of like how there was a noticeable rise in the use of the word ‘java’ over ‘coffee’ here in the U.S. between 1995, when Starbucks went international, and the early 2000s. After that dark period, ‘bunna’ reappears and follows a similar usage pattern as ‘buni’ through the rest of the graph.
Also, who knows for sure whether there was a direct correlation without further research, but it’s fascinating (to me anyway) that the height of the literary discussion on coffee in Ethiopia occurred in the same period that Guatemala cultivated its first coffee plantation, Martinique, Cuba and Costa Rica’s first seeds were being sewn, and the Boston Tea Party chose coffee as its revolutionary beverage of choice. Ethiopia never talked about coffee (in terms of ‘kaffa,’ ‘bunna,’ and ‘buni’) nearly as much again in literary history…at least according to the N’Gram Viewer and the five million books it has on file so far.
That was fun. Now you pick a word and try it!
Let us know what you think, too!
Oh! And here’s the Ted Talk again if you want to watch.
