There are people who assume that Starbucks Coffee was named after the Lieutenant in Battlestar Galactica. There is apparently even a scene in a Starbucks in the revamped new version of the series. The coffee, however, did not receive its name from a science fiction serial.
There are also people who assume that Starbucks Coffee was named after Starbuck in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. This is kind of true. The most common story of how the name came to be is that Starbuck was a Melville character who loved coffee. If you read Moby Dick, however, you will find dickall in the way of references to Starbuck drinking coffee.
Apparently the actual true story of how Starbucks Coffee was named after a Moby Dick character is kind of nonsensical. As real life often is. The founders of Starbucks were casting about for a name and one of them, being a Melville fan and perhaps wanting to use that English degree for something, suggested Pequod for the name. If you are looking blank right now, that was the name of the ship. Yes, terrible idea and nixed by the others involved. They decided they wanted something with local Seattle flavor, so they settled on Starbo after the name of a local mining camp. The dude who was into Melville suggested they transmogrify that into Starbucks.
I wonder if they had to explain to locals how the hell that had local color. Turned out to be a great name though.
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