What is a Glass?

When you ponder drinking from a glass, what do you think of?

A. A handleless drinking container.
B. A handleless drinking container made of glass.
C. Other - please explain.

I'd love to read your thoughts on this riveting subject if you would grace me with your words in my comments section.

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6 comments:

Anonymous said...

If it's not made of glass, it's a cup. Duh :)

Suz said...

Why aren't cup and glass interchangeable with the advent of plastic?

When did the usage of the word 'cup' come into common usage as a drinking container when it was previously just a unit of volume?

And if that common definition changed with the common usage, why can't a glass refer to any drinking container?

Amy said...

"When did the usage of the word 'cup' come into common usage as a drinking container when it was previously just a unit of volume?"

I think you've got it backwards. A "cup" became a standard unit of volume *because* tea cups were something everyone had around the house (same with teaspoon and tablespoon... the items of cutlery were not invented to represent the quantity).

To my mind a glass is a subset of the "cup" concept (a holder for a single serving of liquid), along with tumbler, wineglass, mug, teacup, highball, shotglass, etc. In my world, cups usually have handles and glasses don't but I freely admit that my world does not have a one-to-one relationship with everyone else's world (and I also make an exception for fast-food soda serving holders... it would be odd to call those "glasses").

Anonymous said...

I agree with Clark. A cup is plastic, a glass is glass, a mug has a handle, and I have no idea why. I also find it interesting in pondering this question of yours, that when I grab a cup to melt my popcorn butter in, it will ALWAYS be a mug, although I call that a cup. And I'll drink a cup of tea out of a handled, glass-type container. But if you took the same handled, glass-type container and asked me what it was, I'd say "Mug". And frommy childhood, what I now call a mug (any handled glass-type container) would be a teacup or coffeecup, while "mug" was definitely an earthenware-heavylooking-pottery- fired-in-a-kiln-by-a-hippy-looking vessel. Hmmm, want to disect that thought?

cenobyte said...

cups are a measure of the size of your boobs. We drink out of glasses or mugs.

Suz said...

Dang all of you!!

Maybe my definition of a glass is more broad because we didn't have a lot of actual glass glasses when I was growing up. We had plastic.

Either way, I still maintain that any sort of handleless drinking receptacle is a cup or a glass. And a mug has a handle. A teacup is dainty and has a dainty thin handle.

Jerry wins.

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