100 YEARS OLD AND STILL ARGUING IN SUPERMARKETS...

URGENTLY needing some Roquefort cheese to mash into walnuts to make little taste-bombs to stuff into my chicken mousse-lines the other day, I decided to avail myself of the opportunity to use the My Waitrose card in my wallet to get a free coffee. So I popped into Waitrose, made my purchases, scanned them through the self-checkout and dug out the card from numerous similar cards for other supermarkets.

At such moments, I always wonder why they do not make life easier for their customers by just having one Disloyalty Card, usable in all shops, instead of making us rummage through our wallets to find the appropriate loyalty card every time. Accepting this inconvenience, however, I found the card, added a coffee to my items, and scanned it through. Then I found an assistant holding a pile of tea or coffee containers and requested one of them. And that is when the problems arose.

As you may have noticed, I used the phrase “potential coffee containers” in the above account. That was because I have always been unsure what the technically correct term is for them. On this occasion, however, I asked the young lady, after she had handed one to me, what they were called.

She looked a little confused, blinked a couple of times, stared at me, stared at the item she had just given me, and then firmly said, “Cups”. “Don’t cups have handles?” I asked. “I don’t think they have to,” she replied. “In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary definition of ‘cup’ explicitly states that it may be ‘with or without a handle’.”

“I believe the Oxford Dictionary is being exceedingly lax on that matter,” I said, “but I should point out that it also says the bowl of a cup is ‘usually of hemispherical or hemi-spheroidal shape’. The item you just handed me is neither of those: its shape is more that of a truncated cone.”

She pondered the matter, then suggested that perhaps ‘mug’ was a more appropriate word.

“I think not,” I said. “While ‘mug’ may suggest itself on the grounds that mugs, as opposed to cups, do not generally have saucers and are indeed cylindrical or truncated-conical in shape, they do these days, as even the OED points out, usually have handles.”

“That leaves us back with cups again,” she said. “In that respect, I should mention that the OED reminds us that ‘cup’ is also the terminology for a part of a brassiere and I can assure you that my brassiere cups do not have handles.”

“Neither, I imagine, are they suitable receptacles for coffee,” I said, keeping my eyes firmly on her face.

“We seem to have reached a bit of an impasse,” she said, glancing nervously at the queue that was building up behind me. “What do you suggest we do about it?”

“I think,” I said, after pondering the matter as quickly as a good ponder allowed, “that we should refer to them as truncated conical, reinforced cardboard hot beverage containers.”

So saying, I left and filled mine with a latte, which was most satisfying now that I knew the vessel’s correct name.