The Hidden Power of Words:
Coffee
I’ve been enjoying some Scandinavian literature.
Child, Youth, Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen and Miss Iceland by Audur Ava Olafsdottir.
But much as I highly recommend both books, it’s not the books that I want to write about here.
I want to write about the word coffee.
They drink a lot of coffee in these books. As the narrator in Ditlevsen’s book says,
I’d never had or made tea before. I thought to myself that rich people drank tea and poor people drank coffee.
In both books, the word coffee is plentiful; Ditlevsen’s characters make coffee when they have nothing else to do — a bit like the British make tea. In Olafsdottir’s book, the narrator, Hekla, wants to be a writer, and she haunts the cafe where poets hang out and drink coffee.
Seeing the word coffee so frequently reminded me of what Virginia Woolf said about words and their power of suggestion.
She used the example of Russell Square:
… besides the surface meaning it contained so many sunken meanings.… suggested the rustling of leaves and the skirt on a…
