some meanings of coffee in Mason & Dixon, so to speak...(M &D was yesterday's P in Public book)

[Mark Kohut]

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In 1650, a coffee house opened at the Angel in Oxford that accidentally
created the institution that built the modern world. Lloyd's of London, the
London Stock Exchange, the Royal Society, and the entire concept of a free
press all trace directly back to what happened when English people started
drinking coffee in public. The first English coffeehouse opened in Oxford
in 1650 at the Angel coaching inn. For a single penny admission you could
sit all day, read the newspapers, and participate in conversations with
merchants, scientists and politicians regardless of your social class. The
coffee itself was documented by contemporary observers as thick, black,
extraordinarily bitter and unlike anything the English had tasted before.
People drank it anyway because what was happening around the cup was more
important than what was in it. Samuel Pepys documented his visits in his
diary, describing the admirable discourse and exceeding good arguments he
encountered there. The coffeehouses became known as penny universities. The
name came from a poem written in 1672: so great a university I think there
ne'er was any, in which you may a scholar be for spending of a penny. At
the Grecian Coffee House, members of the Royal Society including Isaac
Newton met regularly to discuss mathematics, astronomy and natural
philosophy. Royal Society meetings were routinely continued socially at the
Grecian, Newton being frequently of the parties. At Lloyd's Coffee House,
merchants and ship captains gathered and from their conversations emerged
Lloyd's of London, the world's largest insurance market. At Jonathan's
Coffee House in Exchange Alley, merchants trading stocks eventually created
the London Stock Exchange. All of it from a penny cup of bitter coffee in a
public room where anyone could sit. The establishments became so
politically influential that King Charles II tried to ban them in 1675,
calling them places where the disaffected met and spread scandalous reports
about his government. The public outcry was so fierce the ban lasted eleven
days before he was forced to reverse it.