A working-class male. The six-pack in this somewhat derogatory name refers to a half-dozen bottles or cans of beer that are packaged together, to be bought as a unit, and supposedly a workingman’s beverage of choice. Six-pack came into use in the early 1950s, and Joe Six-Pack was first recorded in 1970 and quickly proliferated. Reporter Martin F. Nolan used it in an article about Joe Moakley’s political campaign against Louise Day Hicks for Congress: “Moakley plans to make Mrs. Hicks the major issue in the campaign, talking about issues in the media and shouting in Joe Six-Pack’s ear to wake up and face the unsimplistic facts of life (Boston Globe, August 28, 1970). The Globe headline was “After the Soul of Joe Six-Pack.” See also John Doe.

The average person. This appellation actually dates from the thirteenth century, when it was used in legal documents to disguise the identity of witnesses; the tenant plaintiff was called John Doe and the landlord defendant Richard Roe. In the nineteenth century the name acquired the present meaning of ordinary person. A book, The O’Hara Family (1825), included “Tales, Containing . . . John Doe,” and almost a century later a movie starring Gary Cooper was entitled Meet John Doe (1941). Similar appellations include Joe Blow, first recorded in 1867; Joe Doakes, from the 1920s; and John Q. Public, coined by the writer William Allen White in 1937. John Doe has outlived them all.