Coffee goes by many names, including java, brew and, my personal favourite, hot bean juice.
But while those all make sense (the island of Java used to produce most of the world’s coffee ― the others are self-explanatory), I’ve never got what the drink had to do with some guy named “Joe”.
Some think the name comes from Josephus Daniels, who became Secretary Of The US Navy in 1913 and banished booze from his ships, making the strongest drink on board coffee.
However, the fact-checking site Snopes says the phrase came into being long after that and adds that alcohol had been unavailable for most sailors for years prior to Daniels’ appointment.
So what’s going on?
There are two theories, though neither has been definitively proven.
One suggests that the name “Joe”, “Joe Blow” or “average Joe” functioned as a kind of “common man” name in the 1900s (like Tom, Dick and Harry here in the UK). The first written record of this use comes from 1846.
So a “cup of Joe” meant a “common man’s drink,” or the stuff that’d get the working man through the day.
The theory Snopes likes best is the other one, though, which suggests that a “cup of Joe” comes from the shortening of the old word “jamoke,” which is itself a compressed version of the words “Java” and “mocha.”
Linguist Michael Quinion seems to subscribe to that theory due to the strength of its written record.
“It is significant that an early example appears in 1931 in the Reserve Officer’s Manual by a man named Erdman: ’Jamoke, Java, Joe. Coffee. Derived from the words Java and Mocha, where originally the best coffee came from,” he wrote.
This is “the most boring, but most probable, suggestion,” he adds.
How long have we been drinking coffee?
The dictionary Merriam-Webster says “coffee-drinking dates from the 15th century in Arabia.”
It reached Europe by the 17th century and was an instant (well, at that stage slow-brewed) hit.
It’s made from the bean of the coffee plant, whose white flowers smell of jasmine.
“Coffee is consumed by about one-third of the world’s population,” Merriam-Webster adds.