Listeners are sharing their favorite terms for coffee that’s weak, including warm wet, branch water, pond water, scared water, and in the immortal words of Ani DiFranco, just water dressed in brown. One listener has a friend in North Dakota who reuses the same coffee grounds all day and refers to the watered-down beverage as Wabash coffee. This may be connected with the use of wabash as a verb to refer to adding water to a sluggish liquid such as ketchup or shampoo to stretch it out a bit longer. There are plenty of other terms for “weak” or otherwise disappointing coffee around the world. In German, it’s sometimes called Blümchen-kaffee, literally “flower coffee.” In the Hopi language surukaphe means “tail coffee,” or coffee watered down to make it go further. In Brazilian Portuguese slang, chafé means “bad coffee,” a blend of the words for “tea” and “coffee.” Then there’s cholo in Louisiana French, from chaud-l’eau, or “hot water.” A Japanese word takes a dig at American coffee, combining the Japanese word for “American” and the Dutch word koffie. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “I Dub Thee “Weak Coffee””
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
On our Facebook group, David Neal writes that he has a friend in his 80s from North Dakota who loves coffee.
But the thing is that this friend keeps reusing the coffee grounds all day long, which means that by sunset, the guy is pretty much drinking colored water.
And his friend likes that brew just fine.
He proudly calls it Wabash Coffee.
And, Grant, I don’t know.
I have strong feelings about this.
Wabash coffee just sounds, to me, hideous.
It’s thrifty.
It is indeed thrifty.
And we’ve talked about this term Wabash before, meaning to add just a little bit of water to something, to get a little more out of it, to stretch it a little more.
Right.
We talked about adding water to ketchup, to Wabashing it, right, to stretch your ketchup bottle a little bit further, like get the stuff that’s stuck to the side.
Yeah, yeah.
Or watering down your shampoo.
And it may go back to an old slang use of the word wabash meaning to cheat.
So that might be the connection there.
But in any case, this got me to thinking about weak coffee and all the terms there are out there for that terrible stuff.
Yeah, I posted a bunch of these to the Facebook group, and Martha, not just in English, but every language, cares a great deal about how good their coffee is.
As a matter of fact, the Japanese have a word which combines the word American with the Dutch word for coffee, which means a weak coffee.
So they are making fun of Americans for having weak coffee, which I guess is often the case around the world.
We are criticized for our coffee.
But you just have to go to the non-chain places in this country to get the really good coffee.
Well, you know, it requires a lot of research, and I’m happy to do it.
Yeah, Blumkenkaffee in German means flower coffee, which is also used for coffee made out of plants that aren’t coffee plants.
Oh.
There’s also warm wet.
Yeah.
Yeah, that’s a good branch water, which basically means water from the creek.
Pond water.
Maybe some leaves floating in it.
Yeah.
Scared water, which means it was scared to go near the coffee grounds.
Yeah, and I really like the line that Ani DeFranco has in one of her songs about a place where they serve coffee that’s just water dressed in brown.
Water dressed in brown.
That’s lovely.
I love that.
In Brazilian Portuguese slang, they combine the words for tea and coffee, chaffé, to mean weak coffee, which I think is very clever.
And in Louisiana French, it’s cholo, which is not the Spanish word cholo.
It’s kind of a corruption of xolo, which means hot water in traditional French.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Okay.
And there’s many more.
And there’s a couple we can’t say on the air.
Oh, here’s one from the Native American language Hopi.
It’s surkafi, which means tail coffee, referring to the watering down of the last coffee to make it go further.
So it’s literally what this fellow in his 80s is doing.
He’s watering it down to make it just last a little longer.
Well, maybe you’re like me and you’re a huge fan of coffee and you have a term for coffee that just doesn’t measure up.
Let us know, 877-929-9673, or send your thoughts and email to words@waywordradio.org.
