"Cup of joe" was first recorded as entering the English language in 1930, a full 16 years after the grumblings of disgruntled sailing men supposedly put the term into common parlance.  There are two stronger theories for how "coffee" came to be "joe," but neither is verifiable.  The first asserts that "joe" is a corruption of one of two other slang words for coffee:  java and jamoke, the latter itself a compression of java and mocha.  Under that theory, a "cup of jamoke" could easily have slip-slid its way into being a "cup of joe."  People do love to shorten their slang terms, after all.  The second postulates that since "joe" is argot for a "fellow, guy, chap" (the earliest sighting of its being used that way dates to 1846), that a "cup of joe" thus means the common man's drink.  The lexicon of English is replete with instances of "joe" being used to denote a typical guy who is wholly interchangeable with any other guy in the same line of work or area of special interest:  "G.I. Joe," "Holy Joe" (a chaplain or especially sanctimonious person), "Joe College," "Joe Blow," and of course "the average joe."  "Cup of joe" therefore would be the stuff that fuels the common man.  Of the two best theories, jamoke morphing into joe is the strongest contender thanks to this find by linguist Michael Quinion:  "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.'"  Barbara Mikkelson   https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cup-of-joe/   

The word “skyscraper” originally was a nautical term referring to a small triangular sail set above the skysail on a sailing ship.  The term was first applied to buildings in the late 19th century as a result of public amazement at the tall buildings being built in Chicago and New York City.  The first skyscraper was for many years thought to be the Home Insurance Building built in Chicago in 1885. More recent arguments point to New York’s seven floor Equitable Life Assurance Building built in 1870 and it was arguably the first office building built using a kind of skeletal frame but it depends on what factors are chosen and even the scholars making the argument find it academic.  The structural definition of the word skyscraper was refined later by architectural historians, based on engineering developments of the 1880s that had enabled construction of tall multi-storey buildings.  This definition was based on the steel skeleton—-as opposed to constructions of load-bearing masonry, which passed their practical limit in 1891 with Chicago’s Monadnock Building.  The steel frame developed in stages of increasing self-sufficiency, with several buildings in Chicago and New York advancing the technology that allowed the steel frame to carry a building on its own.  Today, however, many of the tallest skyscrapers are built almost entirely with reinforced concrete.  A loose convention in the United States and Europe now draws the lower limit of a skyscraper at 150 meters (~500 ft).  A skyscraper taller than 300 meters (~1000 ft) may be referred to as supertall.  Shorter buildings are still sometimes referred to as skyscrapers if they appear to dominate their surroundings.  https://vincentloy.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/origin-of-the-word-skyscraper/ 

HAVE YOU SEEN ME?  MISSING WORKS OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE by Zachary Turpin  October 2023

Knowing what is missing is an important first step.  Indeed, sometimes simply bringing a problem to light can speed its solution.  

·         One of the more recent examples of this is the rediscovery of Kate Chopin’s late, lost short story, “Her First Party,” in 2013.  The story was known to have existed, but for decades scholars despaired of knowing where to look.  Success finally came when researchers Bonnie James Shaker and Angela Pettitt combed through an online periodicals database “outside the logical, searchable framework of Chopin’s lifespan” 

·        Decades before he would become a poetic iconoclast, a young Walt Whitman, age twelve, found a job as an editor’s apprentice at the Long-Island Patriot, his father’s Democratic newspaper of choice.  During the year or so he worked for the paper (1831-32), he published in the Patriot what he would later call “a few sentimental bits,” none of which have been identified so far.

·        Louisa May Alcott’s missing works of 1855-59  In her “Notes and Memoranda” ledger (now housed at Harvard’s Houghton Library, and published as part of her Journals), Louisa May Alcott kept track of roughly thirty years’ worth of personal earnings and major family events. 

·       The most recent rediscoveries of Emily Dickinson verses published in the poet’s lifetime were in 1982 and 1984, both by scholar Karen Dandurand.  Her list of the publications of Dickinson’s poems in her lifetime (to which has only been added her 1850 “Magnum bonum harum scarum” Valentine Eve letter) is the still-comprehensive standard.  So far as is known, Dickinson never asked for her poetry to be published, which may explain why these publications are invariably unsigned and must be correlated to a known manuscript.  Nearly all were printed between 1850 and 1870, with most appearing in the nine-year window of 1858-66.

·       A full accounting of Mark Twain’s published works is ongoing, particularly of those writings that appeared in small newspapers early in his career.  As Merle Johnson, Twain’s first serious bibliographer, explained in 1910, the author’s “literary production covered a period of practically five decades.  His range of activities included newspaper, magazine, book, and speech.  He lived in a dozen places, from Honolulu to Vienna. Europe, Canada, and the United States vied for the first publication of his work.  These things, together with the immense volume of publication, render it practically impossible to make these lists technically complete.” 

·        Harriet Prescott Spofford’s tale “In a Cellar,” which first appeared anonymously in the Atlantic Monthly in 1859, was the beginning of her popularity as a writer of mysteries and Gothic romances.  But it was not the beginning of her writing career; she’d spent much of the 1850s submitting stories to Boston newspapers, usually receiving tiny sums for them.  While Spofford’s novels are now well known, none of her early anonymous works have yet been found.  Read extensive article and see pictures at https://commonplace.online/article/have-you-seen-me/ 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2742  November 8, 2023