Monday, April 14, 2008

 

Good to the Last Drop

My friend Jim K. sent me a link to Emily Andrews, "World's most expensive coffee at £50 a cup comes to British stores...and it's made from cats' droppings," Daily Mail (April 10, 2008). The cats are palm civets of Indonesia, the store is Peter Jones, in Sloane Square, London, and the coffee is called Luwak coffee.

Jim's email had the subject line Good to the Last Drop, which for many years has been an advertising slogan for Maxwell House coffee. It occurred to me that it would also be a fitting slogan for Luwak coffee. The steps in my contorted thinking are (1) the last drop is the dregs; (2) the Latin word for dregs or sediment is faex; (3) English feces comes from the plural of faex, i.e. faeces; and (4) Luwak coffee beans are extracted from the feces of the palm civet.

I also wondered if English dregs (meaning sediment) was etymologically related to dreck (meaning excrement), but it is not.

Related post: Cowslip.



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