Qaffeination

My dad has explained to several of my American friends about some of Arabic's funny letters and how they are said. There is one letter in particular which truly points out where in the world my family lives. My family is Lebanese Druze. (Here's the wiki on Druze if you're interested).

The Druze are known for particularly saying one letter known as qaff. In Arabic there are several different 'k' type letters. There is Kaf, which is the normal k/c used in English. There is "khay" with the hard sound. Usually this is considered more of a hard 'h,' but it depends on who you ask and how fluent they are in English. The last is qaff, which is generally written as 'q' in English transliterations. Think "Al - qaeda" or "Qatar." The Lebanese aside from the Druze leave off the 'q' sound entirely and instead simply say "aff." One of my cousins is the only druze at her university and the other lebanese students know this so they ask her to say "qaff" for them. However, she, like I grew up with a lot of television and so she says qaff in the normal modern Lebanese way (whereas my english is not so heavily Tennessean). I should point out quickly that the Lebanese Arabic is considered quite strange in the Arab world already...

The funny thing to me about this story was that she said the other students asked her to say "qaff" by saying some word in arabic which sounded to my ears very close to "caffeinate." I guess while I'm here, in addition to the absurd amount of tea and coffee I'm drinking (more than India because they serve tea in large mugs here...) I'm also getting qaffeinated.