What is the brown cardboard covering coffee cups called in English?

23 Nov.,2022

 

paper cup with handles

I've certainly heard these corrugated cup-coverings casually called coffee condoms by college kids around campus (with the occasional “ribbed for her pleasure” snickers).

As might be expected of a coinage like this, Urban Dictionary offers the most baldfaced definition of this bit of street slang:

Coffee Condom

The name for the sleeve that goes around your handle-less paper coffee cup to insulate the drinker's hands from hot coffee.

Similar to how a latex condom is designed to protect you from sexually transmitted diseases the "coffee condom" is designed to protect your hand from the hot cup of coffee.

Java Jacket

Smithsonian Magazine from 2013-08-13 had an article on “How the Coffee Cup Sleeve Was Invented” containing a more detailed history of this device, including this small bit:

Jay Sorensen invented the Java Jacket in 1991 as a solution to a common problem—hot coffee burns fingers. The idea emerged in 1989 when he was pulling out of a coffee shop drive-through on the way to his daughter’s school and a coffee spill burned his fingers, forcing him to release a scalding cup of coffee onto his lap. At the time, he was struggling as a realtor in the years since closing his family-owned service station in Portland, Oregon. While the coffee accident was unfortunate, it gave him the germ of an innovative idea: there had to be a better way to drink coffee on the go.

Sorensen ended up patenting his Java Jacket idea, and he sells a billion (B-I-L-L-I-O-N) of these a year. But the one you get at Starbucks is ever so lightly different enough that they got their own patent after Sorenson got his. An earlier patent for such a device was granted back in 1964:

And there have been many others besides that one. The Smithsonian article also mentions one called a portable coaster back in 1947.

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