the.com/coffee break
The only meeting where nothing gets decided and everyone's fine with that.
means A short pause from work, typically taken to drink coffee (or do anything else that isn't working), that became a normal, even sanctioned, part of the day.
from A 20th-century American coinage, popularized through workplace and advertising usage — notably a mid-1900s coffee-industry ad campaign that promoted the phrase to encourage office coffee drinking. It simply compounds 'coffee' with 'break' (a pause from labor), but its spread owes a lot to marketing rather than organic slang.
- origin
- 1890s wisconsin factory let workers pause for coffee
- productivity myth
- short breaks actually boost focus afterward, studies confirm
- corporate irony
- invented to control breaks, not grant freedom