Ceci n’est pas une tasse.

This is not a cup.

I requested a cup at the coffee shop, one of the ceramic cups on the shelf sitting underneath the tea display, but I was given this thing, which is not a cup. And it’s not anyone’s fault (except that it is a lot of someones’ fault), but there’s some confusion anymore about what constitutes a cup.

Thing is, someone once got it into their head that this was a cup, and then they got it into other people’s heads that this is a cup. But what it is is paper lined with polyethylene that some people try, mistakenly, to recycle, and other people throw in the trash can from whence it goes to a landfill and sits in the landfill indefinitely where it produces the greenhouse gas called methane, which is 30 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, both gases that drive climate change.

This is not a cup.

A cup is something that holds liquid so that you can drink, then gets washed and goes back onto the shelf where it waits until you need it again.

For those unclear about what a cup is and isn’t I offer visual aids.

There are a lot of different kinds of cups in this world, but this?

This is not a cup.