Grammarian's café
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At London's Gatwick Airport, I had a very good cup of coffee in a café called Apostrophe. I was thinking that if there is a more perfect name for a place where a traveling grammarian can stop off for an americano, I don't know what it would be. But then I remembered why that is not true.
There is a café at the University of Santiago de Compostela, in Galicia, northwest Spain, called (in Galician) Cafeteria de Filoloxia (translation: Café of Philology, or Philological Café). Philology is the discipline dealing with the linguistic properties of literary and historical texts, and to a significant extent 20th-century linguistics grew out of 19th-century philology. I was at the Cafeteria de Filoloxia in May 2008, and I can prove it:
May you find good coffee wherever you travel.
[Added later: There apparently used to be a bar in Manchester (England) with the name Tmesis, which is a Greek-derived grammatical term for the insertion of a lexical element between two parts of a separable word (as seen, playfully, in abso-fucking-lutely).And there is a restaurant in Chicago (an expensive, award-winning one) called Alinea. That is the Latin name for the paragraph-marking character also known as the pilcrow, so there are at least two places to partake of refreshment that are named after non-alphanumeric glyphs of grammatical relevance. My god, this is over-nerdy even for Language Log, isn't it?]
Photography credit: thanks to Antonella Sorace. Thanks also to Curtis Booth, Bob Moore, and Mark Gould.