Wordwatch - Cafe

I was on my way to work on the bus the other day when I passed a glass fronted shop with a curved awning. An arc of words across the large pane said, “Tony’s Cafe”. I couldn’t see clearly inside from where I sat on the double-decker but I knew it wasn’t a “café” but a “caff”.

A “café” (with a fancy French accent on the “e” and pronounced “caf-fay”) is where they serve fancy coffees like cappuccino and lattes and you sit in stylish chairs at carefully placed small tables and watch the world go by. Or write your novel on a shiny laptop. Or kiss your friends on both cheeks when they join you. Or read the latest Booker prize winner.

A “cafe” (with no fancy “e” on the end and pronounced “caff”) is where they serve tea so strong it puts hairs on your chest but they couldn’t make decent coffee to save their lives and they make great, greasy fry-up English breakfasts that will have you dropping dead at an early age and where you say “awright, mate?” when your friends come by or you sit and read a tabloid.

A café is in a fancy part of town like Covent Garden and a caff, like the one I passed, is in somewhere like the Walworth Road in South London.

In Malaysia, the equivalent of a “caff” is a coffeeshop where they make strong, sweet “kopi” or “teh” with evaporated or condensed milk and do mean fried noodles and “chicken chop”. Are there many of these left any more? Or have they all been globalised into Starbucks and Gloria Jeans Coffeehouse?

I love a café when I’m in the mood to be in my head and “un peu intellecto” as they might say in Paris. But I adore caffs and coffeeshops when I’m in the mood to be down-to-earth and scruffy and to eat some tasty fried food. Crispy bacon and sausages with fried eggs and baked beans and fried tomatoes and mushrooms on the side plus a couple of slices of toasted white bread dripping with butter – or better yet, fried bread! I’ll take that any day over a precious little croissant.

To borrow a line from Apocalypse Now, “I love the smell of frying bacon in the morning.”

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This is a new, occasional series on words and language. When I was a child, I loved reading the dictionary and learning new words. I loved their sounds and the depth and the layers of meaning waiting to be unwrapped. Words and language evolve all the time - from the clash of cultures when the Vikings and Germans and Normans invaded Britain through the Great Vowel Shift in medieval times to the local flavour that Commonwealth countries splash into their versions of English and the impact of new technologies and new sub-cultures on traditional usage. I hope you will take part in this series by sharing your experiences of how language is used wherever in the world you live and also suggesting words or aspects of language to explore.