An open letter to the International Board of Gulps & Measures:

32 ounces! Whoa! This is one strapping BPA-free farmboy who’s been eating his big country breakfast every morning. That’s big enough to hold half of the (actually mythical) 64 ounces of water you’re supposed to drink every day. Hmm, how does it compare to a Big Gulp? Or a Super Big Gulp? Or a Double Gulp? How big are those, anyway?

Dodging the shifty creeps buying lottery tickets and chaw, the aroma of slowly thawing taquitos filling our nostrils, we discover that the Contigo Addison is the same size as a 32-ounce Big Gulp. Which is also about the same size of a typical human stomach. In other words, really all you need at one gulp. Question answered.

But then we notice something else. There’s the regular Gulp at 20 ounces. The Super Big Gulp is 44 ounces. And the Double Gulp is… 50 ounces? Whaaaat? How is that “Double”? 50 isn’t “double” any of those. What’s going on here?

We dug into the historical record to find that the Double Gulp was originally 64 ounces when introduced in 1988, but was quietly reduced to 50 ounces in 2012. And yet 7-11 has gone on calling it the Double Gulp.

Maybe you think “Hey, 7-11 was trying to do the right thing by reducing the Double Gulp to fight obesity. Cut them a break.” But the company’s own Fun Facts state that they made the change “because consumers wanted the large cup to better fit into a ‘vehicle-sized’ cup holder.”

It never should have been double the size of the Big Gulp anyway. When the 20-ounce Gulp was introduced, that should have been established as the basic measurement that any mathematically specific increment is based on. 7-11 missed a perfect opportunity to bring some rationality to the Gulp system. That order is sorely needed given that the Gulp’s relation to its anatomical inspiration (one human gulp) is even more strained than the relationship between the measurement of “foot” and any human’s actual foot.

At the root of the problem is the treatment of “Double” as equivalent to other superlative terms like “Big” or “Super”. “Double” makes a very specific numerical claim. When a mathematician is instructed to double a number, she doesn’t just kind of make it bigger until it seems big enough. She multiplies it by two. What is the Double Gulp multiplying by two? What is a Gulp, anyway?

Thus the Double Gulp’s name makes a mockery of the very terms “Double” and “Gulp”. It’s this kind of erratic imprecision that doomed other once-common increments like the cubit, the talent, and the pennyweight.

So, given the established precedent, we call on the International Board of Gulps & Measures to codify 20 ounces as the official size of a Gulp, and to enforce truth in labeling with the so-called Double Gulp. Effective immediately, the Double Gulp should either be defined as 40 ounces, or be renamed the 2.5 Gulp, or at least something numerically nonspecific like the Mega Gulp, the Ridiculous Gulp, or the Alarmingly Swollen Gulp.

Otherwise, it’s like the “Gulp” unit just doesn’t mean anything.