If you’ve ever used a straw to sip out of your soda can and found yourself looking like a fool in public because that suck-cylinder bobs around your tongue like you’re making out with a ghost, we’ve got you covered today. Apparently, once you pop a soda can tab, it can be spun around and used as a perfect straw holder.

This is America, if you want to drink a soda through your nostrils, with a straw, or dipping your hand into a vat of carbonated liquid and letting it seep in through your pores, you have every right to do so. Over the past couple months, we’ve learned how to eat a cupcake like a genteman and how to dispense a Tic Tac properly, so why not get more versed on our soda sipping etiquette?

Personally, I sip my soda through a straw because I have dainty teeth (yeah I said it) and it hurts my choppers to drink it otherwise. So when I found out that soda cans have a methodical reasoning for their tab design, I nearly sh*t my pants through my brain. I had been sipping through a straw incorrectly for over 20 years.

The discovery happened when I was sitting in the lobby of our office building late last Friday. My friend Mike was on his way out the front door and in passing he mysteriously asked, “Elie, do you know how to use a soda can properly?”

“I’m a grown man,” I thought to myself, of course I know how to use a soda can. I have great parents, they taught me to tie my shoes, boil an egg, and of course, drink a soda can — but I decided to oblige him, “No…how do you use a soda can?”

He proceeded to look at me with a smirk, and calmly explained, “You know that pop tab? After you crack open your soda, spin it around over the open hole, it’s meant to hold your straw in place.”

Just as quickly as he’d entered my life that moment and enlightened my soda-drinking existence, he exited with a smug one liner, “Sip on that buddy.”

And so I did, and thanks to Mike, I’ll never accidentally get a straw up my nostril while sipping soda through a straw again.

Elie AyrouthTwitterFacebook

Elie is a product of Orange County, CA. In early 2012, his dentist diagnosed him with 8 different cavities, three of which on the same tooth, as a result of his 23-year Sour Patch Kid addiction.