A man named V.K. Krishna Menon once spoke for eight hours in front of the United Nations Security Council. Strom Thurmond filibustered Congress for one day and 18 minutes straight. William Henry Harrison died from pneumonia contracted while giving a 90-minute speech in an ice storm.
Soon you will be sitting through a painfully long speech. It may be given by one of your friends or loved ones — or someone who went to school with one of them — or by a celebrity, professor or school administrator. It's that time of year. With graduation (congrats, Jumbos 2010!) come speeches, and with speeches come awkward water pauses.
There is no doubt in my mind that Mr. Menon, Mr. Thurmond, President Harrison and University President Lawrence Bacow all have at least one thing in common: the need for hydration and, more specifically, for hydration while speaking in public.
How annoying is it, both for the speaker and the audience, when there is a pause to make way for a raised glass and a gulp of water. It interrupts the flow and generally kills the speech. It's the worst!
But what if there was a way to quench the thirst without interruption? Rather than a big gulp, what about a little sip?
Enter the straw.
A little hollow tube of plastic could solve so many issues.
Give a kid a straw and he blows bubbles in his milk; give a politician a straw, and she might make it through her entire speech sans major drink pauses.
For speakers, I'd recommend the straight straw or the bendy straw, but there are other types perfectly suited to other activities: the crazy straw for brightening up bad moods; the bubble tea straw for those times when both hydration and self-defense via blow darts is important; the slushie straw for … well, slushies; and the miniscule juice box straw for secret sipping.
Now there's even a straw that can purify water inside the straw; in the glass the water is dirty, but in your mouth it's clean. Wow.
The plastic straw that we know and love didn't come into existence until the early 1900s, replacing the weaker paper straw, and before the paper straw, people who craved an interesting way to sip a beverage used naturally hollow stalks of grass. Yes, straws were literally made of straw.
Straws are not magic; straws are science. They work because we can change the pressure level in our mouths by sucking, which allows atmospheric pressure to force the liquid up the straw. In other words, straws allow the sky to help you drink your Fresca. If that's not synergy, I don't know what is.
While it's hard to imagine any drawbacks to straws (or as I'd like to call them — and I apologize in advance for calling them this — "strawbacks"), the facts must be faced: hot beverages, when imbibed through straws, become finely focused, rendering them mouth-scalding lasers of hurt; if bent the wrong way, straws are liable to snap and break, making them more of a hindrance than a help; straws can look extremely silly; and lastly and most terrifyingly, if you suck too hard, you can be sucked through the straw and, quite possibly, drown in your drink.
OK, so that last one only happened in a Pepsi commercial in the '90s, but I'm sure it scared some people away from drinking straws for a while.
Say what you will about oral fixations and that horrible slurping sound at the end of a soda, or about choking on violently accelerated ice chips — the risk is worth the reward. The drinking straw provides a vital link between the mouth and the drink. It's a miniature tunnel from the liquid to the mouth, like the Chunnel if the Chunnel was … filled with liquid … and was … a straw.
My metaphors may be weak, but the pull of straws is quite strong. (Nailed it.)
Drinking straws: 4 out of 5 stars.
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Mitchell Geller is a rising senior majoring in psychology. He can be reached at Mitchell.Geller@tufts.edu.
