Yaffa Beauty

In my September 22 post "A turquoise stone; and suns, moons, and armies with banners," I compared these two lines from the Song of Solomon:

beautiful . . . as Tirzah, comely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with banners (6:4)

fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners (6:10)

I noted that "beautiful" in v. 4 and "fair" in v. 6 are translations of the same Hebrew word. This can be transliterated in various ways, and in fact the Bible Hub Interlinear Bible from which I got the information renders it yāp̄āh, but in the post I spelled it yafah, which is my understanding of how it is pronounced. A p with a macron seemed unnecessarily pedantic (not that there's anything wrong with that!). I'm not sure why I didn't go with ph, which would have been more in keeping with King James spelling (Ephraim, seraphim, etc.). I hadn't known the word before looking it up; the Tirza dream led me to those two verses, and I wanted to see how closely they paralleled each other.

Today, I passed this beauty salon on the street:

The fact that it's a beauty salon, and yafah is Hebrew for "beautiful," suggests that the name is not a coincidence. The Chinese characters for the salon's name have no meaning but are used to transliterate foreign names. Apparently someone decided to open a beauty salon in Taiwan and name it after the Hebrew word for "beautiful" -- but why Hebrew? Taiwan has a negligible Jewish population (a grand total of two synagogues in the whole country), and Christians (who might take an interest in Hebrew as a biblical language) are a small minority.

Yafa is also a feminine name in Arabic, cognate with the Hebrew word. Since Taiwan has about 200 times as many Muslims as Jews, that seems a likelier source of the name. The Muslims here aren't Arabs -- most are from Indonesia -- but I would assume that many of them have Arabic names, for the same reason that many Europeans have Hebrew names. Lots of nail salons are operated by Southeast Asians, so it fits. It might be the owner's name.

Searching for yaffa beauty turned up a South African company by that name, with the blurb in the search result emphasizing that they offer "more than just shampoo."

Since shampoo has recently come up ("Shampoo as food"), I clicked through. The homepage was advertising Koffee Shampoo.

Since the "Shampoo as food" post began by associating shampoo with buttered toast, this link between shampoo and coffee would seem to be continuing that theme. Some years ago I wrote something about a Danish character who began every day with "hot buttered coffee and strong black toast" (same concept as the spoonerized Swedish dishes the Babylonians eat in Yes and No; the "strong black toast" is rugbrød), so that's synchronistic precedent for swapping out toast for coffee.