Or, why coffee beans?
There may be folks around the world wondering what in the world beans have to do with spelling. In American English, there’s an idiom, “spill the beans,” which means to divulge or blurt out information that was supposed to be secret. “Spell the Beans” is just a play on words of that. You are playing with words, and in a sense you’re spelling the spilled beans by placing letters on them. And coffee is arguably the most popular bean in the world, as well as a universal symbol of mental stimulation and caffeinated sharpness.
The shape of the beans also factors in. The roughly elliptical shape ultimately lends itself to a better variety of random spill patterns than, say, more circular chickpeas, mustard seed, Macadamia, or mung, though the trigonometry caused us to lose a few more hairs in the process, and a resulting need to convert degrees to radians lay overlooked much longer than it should have. Like old Gregor Mendel, we did do rigorous controlled bean experiments, but found java dominant over lentils, limas, and sundry other legumes for this particular purpose.
Soybeans gave coffee a run for its money, but in the end couldn’t squeeze out the elongation required, and, despite being the world’s most consumed legume, let’s face it, lacked on their resumé the undeniable social currency and cachet coffee’s earned over so many millenia of human history. The cross between fresh snow peas and Brazil nuts, while not tasting too bad with something quenching to wash it down, was something you’d rather not stare at on your iPhone or iPad for an extended period, trust us. And if we’d made “Spell the Cabbage,” rest assured bok choy would have prevailed on irregularity, so to speak, over round cannonball cabbage or Brussels sprouts.
The shape of things to come
And, not to spill the beans, but we do have a stew of non-coffee strains with rule variations in mind down the pipeline. So lettuce all look forward to that. Oh, did we mention if a bad gag is anywhere within a 250 mile radius, we have a high-tech state-of-the-art sensor system to detect and blurt it out on sight without regard to obviousness, inanity or risk to reputation? Well, we do.
Spell the Beans, boldly bumbling where no one else dares, spreading obsolescent idioms across the seven seas, and clearing out a space for undiluted spelling pleasure for all. You’re welcome.
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