From across the coffee shop, I observe a middle-aged woman with dark-rimmed glasses and a button-down blouse. After ordering an in-house mug and a scone, or whatever middle-aged women eat for breakfast, she goes over to the counter with the five different pots of coffee, takes a step back to compensate for her now-less-than-perfect eyesight, shifts her weight to the right leg and turns her head slightly. She pushes down the lever and all throughout the coffee shop you hear the air coming out along with the few remaining drops of coffee in the pot. She pushes it down several more times. Then she glances over at the bar and the cashier and makes her way in that direction. Still two or three paces away, she leans towards the barista and, with the now-splattered mug in one hand she points up (though she intends to point at the pots behind her) and says, as if whispering, but in a completely audible voice, “The yirgacheffe is all.”

That’s right: “The. Yirgacheffe. Is. All.”

This is how Lancastrians speak. Even the high society organic-fair-trade coffee drinkers among us, who are careful to e-nun-ci-ate every syllable of the very exotic, very swanky word yirgacheffe, speak this way.

To say that something is all is to say it is gone, used up, heretofore nonexistent. And it should be noted that this phrase, intended as a statement, ends with what sounds suspiciously like the sort of voice inflection that, in most corners of the English-speaking world, is reserved for questions.

“The yirgacheffe is all?”

It occurs to me as I sip on my own cup of yirgacheffe that maybe, just maybe, this phrase I ponder - this mostly nonsensical but in this situation completely understood statement-question hybrid - has never been spoken before in the history of the planet.

These, I realize, are among the just deserts of waking up early and going to the coffee shop in an attempt to become a born again morning person.